Civita di Bagnoregio Culture

Civita’s culture is a question rather than a tradition: what a town becomes when almost nobody lives in it. The permanent residents are very few, the buildings are largely restored, and most of the working population walks in across the bridge each morning to open the businesses.

That produces an unusual situation, and the town is honest about it. The entry fee is not a visitor tax dressed up; it is hypothecated to the engineering, and the sums involved are publicly discussed. Civita is used as a case study internationally for exactly this.

The food is Tuscia food, from the valley and the plateau rather than from the rock: bruschetta with new oil, lombrichelli, beans, and the chickpea and bean dishes of the Bolsena shore. The olive mill inside the town is cut into the tufa and is one of the few remaining traces of ordinary work here.

The town has been used as a setting repeatedly on film and, more consequentially for its visitor numbers, is widely believed to have inspired animated depictions of a sky-island town — a connection that is often asserted and has never been confirmed by the studio concerned.