The Footbridge to Civita historical timeline

The bridge is sixty years old and the problem it solves is twenty-six centuries old. Civita was founded on a tufa spur that sits on marine clay, and the clay erodes: the Etruscans were embanking rivers and cutting drainage channels after the landslips of 280 B.C., the Romans took the works on, and when they were abandoned the ground went and eventually the town did too. What a visitor crosses today is a reinforced-concrete span of 1965 standing in for a connection the landscape used to provide -- and paying, since June 2013, for the comune at either end of it.

Chronology

1. 6th c. B.C. The Etruscans found Civita on one of the oldest roads in Italy, which joined the Tiber -- then a major navigation route of central Italy -- to Lake Bolsena. The ground was gentler then, and that road crossed where the bridge now flies.
2. 280 B.C. Earth tremors and landslips hit the area, and the Etruscans answer with works to embank the rivers and cut drainage channels so the water runs off the hill properly. The erosion that eventually made a bridge necessary is already the local engineering problem.
3. 265 B.C. The Romans arrive and continue the rainwater canalisation and torrent containment on an imposing scale. After them the works are neglected, the ground degrades fast, and Civita is in the end abandoned -- the connection to Bagnoregio going with it.
4. 1900s The writer Bonaventura Tecchi, who spent his youth here, calls Civita "the city that is dying". The name has stuck to the place and to the view from the crossing.
5. 1962 Steno films I due colonnelli at Civita, the first of a long run of productions drawn to the same approach shot. Civita also gave Hayao Miyazaki the inspiration for Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
6. 1965 The reinforced-concrete footbridge is built, replacing what the landscape had removed. It is pedestrian, and it becomes the only way in.
7. 1971 The episode Il prete of Contestazione generale is shot here, followed by Beppe Cino's Il cavaliere, la morte e il diavolo in 1983.
8. 2002 The opening sequences of Terra nostra 2 - La speranza are filmed at Civita, and Alberto Sironi's two-part Pinocchio follows in 2009.
9. 2005 The calanchi of Civita are proposed as a Site of Community Importance -- the eroding landscape the bridge crosses given a protection of its own.
10. 2011 TIM shoots its Renaissance-set advertisements here; Subito.it follows in 2023.
11. 2013 Access becomes chargeable in June, at 5 euros. The toll raises enough that communal taxes are abolished in Civita and in Bagnoregio itself -- a footbridge funding two municipalities.
12. 2017 Edoardo Falcone's Questione di karma is filmed at Civita, and Alessandro Genovesi's Puoi baciare lo sposo in 2018.
13. 2025 About ten people live on the far side of the bridge. The comune still permits them, and others it authorises, to cross by cycle or motorcycle at set times.

Survival and restoration

This is the one structure in Civita whose survival is not in question and whose purpose is entirely about something else's. Concrete laid in 1965 is not what is eroding; the outcrop it lands on is. Civita's base layer is an older marine clay particularly subject to erosion, under upper layers of tufaceous and lavic material, and the rate is driven by the torrents, the weather and historic deforestation. Four of the town's five gates have gone, along with most of the Etruscan chamber tombs once visible at the base of the cliff and the neighbouring tufa walls.

The bridge's own conservation measure is its loading rule. It is crossed on foot, with the single exception the comune makes for residents and authorised persons on cycles and motorcycles at set times -- a village of about ten people getting its shopping and its building materials in at the lowest practical weight.

And since June 2013 the crossing has funded the thing it serves. The 5-euro charge was enough to abolish communal taxes in both Civita and Bagnoregio, which makes the turnstile at the end of this bridge the economic basis of the comune that maintains the village it leads to.

• Wikipedia