Roman Amphitheatre of Sutri historical timeline

The arena is the oldest thing a visitor can walk into here and the hardest to date: both accounts of it say only "of the Roman period". What is documented is the reason a town this size has one at all. Sutri was the compulsory passage into Etruria, which Livy makes one of its two keys, and it was fought over for four centuries before Rome settled veterans in it. The amphitheatre was then cut out of the same tuff as the Etruscan tombs across the ravine, and because there is no masonry in it, there was nothing for the following two thousand years to take away.

Chronology

1. Bronze Age The earliest occupation, on the evidence of archaeological finds of several periods from the area. One legend credits the foundation to the Pelasgians, eastern navigators; another to Saturn, who still rides across the town's arms with three ears of wheat in his hand.
2. 386 B.C. The Latin colony at Sutrium is lost -- the first of several reversals on a site that was strategic precisely because it controlled the road into Etruria.
3. 383 B.C. Rome takes Sutri definitively after the fall of Veii and recolonises it. The town had grown strongly under Etruscan rule as an agricultural and trading centre, and the Etruscan walls were later incorporated into the medieval ones, which is still visible.
4. 311-310 B.C. The Etruscans besiege Sutri and fail to take it. The tuff hill, ringed by ravines and joined to the country by a single neck on the west, is the reason.
5. 1st c. B.C. Under the triumvirs the town receives a colony of veterans. No source dates the amphitheatre, but a veteran colony is the kind of place that acquires one, and the arena cut into the rock below the town is of the Roman period.
6. 465 Saint Eusebius, the first resident bishop of whom there is certain notice, holds a see that had existed from at least the fifth century. Legend has Saint Peter himself sending Saint Romulus as bishop at the dawn of Christianity.
7. 728 The Lombard king Liutprand offers the city and the surrounding lands to Pope Gregory II. The Donation of Sutri is reckoned the beginning of the Church's temporal dominion -- the first step towards the Patrimony of St Peter -- which makes this small town the legal origin of the Papal State.
8. 800s The legend of Berta is set here: Charlemagne's sister, disinherited and exiled for a relationship with a man of humble birth, stops at Sutri on the road to Rome and in a cave gives birth to Roland, the future paladin of France. The caves are still in the cliffs.
9. 1046 The Council of Sutri, called by the emperor Henry III, ends the schism between three rival claimants to the papacy and leads to the election of Clement II. A town of a few thousand settles who is pope.
10. 1207 The Duomo's belltower is built. It and the Lombard-period crypt -- seven naves divided by twenty columns of different origins -- are what survive of the medieval church inside a largely rebuilt fabric.
11. 1243-1244 Sutri is briefly the papal seat, when Innocent IV settles here to escape the emperor Frederick II, whom he had himself excommunicated.
12. c. 1337 Petrarch, writing to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna about his first journey to Rome, calls Sutri a seat dear to Ceres and an ancient colony of Saturn, records the field outside the walls said to be the first in Italy sown with wheat, and judges the climate thoroughly healthy.
13. 1433 The condottiere Niccolò Fortebraccio burns the borgo. Sutri declines sharply in both population and economy from this point, helped by the diversion of trade onto the Via Cimina in favour of Ronciglione, which the Farnese were building up, and becomes a minor rural town of the Papal State.
14. 1435 The bishopric is united with that of Nepi -- the administrative proof of the decline. In 1556 the future Pope Pius V holds the see, and many works in the Duomo are dedicated to him.
15. late 1700s French troops take the town and attach it to Ronciglione; the Restoration returns it to the Papal State.
16. 1943 Thirteen Sardinian airmen are murdered at Sutri by the Nazis on 17 November.
17. 2018 The Museo di Palazzo Doebbing opens on 14 September, giving the town a second indoor site alongside the Museo del Patrimonium.
18. 2019 Sutri joins I Borghi più belli d'Italia on 24 October. The seven-hectare archaeological and naturalistic park around the amphitheatre is the centre of what that recognises.

Survival and restoration

Nothing had to be done to preserve this amphitheatre, and that is a consequence of how it was made. A built arena is a stockpile of dressed stone standing in the open, and for two thousand years that is exactly how such buildings were treated -- which is why most Roman amphitheatres survive as a fragment of their own circuit. Sutri's contains no cut blocks. The tiers are the hill, stepped back; the arena is the floor left at the bottom. There was nothing to carry off, so the full ellipse of about 49 by 40 metres is still readable.

What it is exposed to instead is wear and weather on soft rock. Tuff is the most workable stone the Romans used in quantity and the least durable, and here every seating edge is living rock rather than a replaceable facing. The same material and the same vulnerability run through the rest of the site -- the Etruscan necropolis, the rock-cut church of the Madonna del Parto made out of one of its tombs, the catacomb of San Giovenale, the sewers cut below the southern walls.

The town's own buildings fared less well. The borgo was burnt in 1433, and the Duomo, Romanesque in origin, is largely modern apart from the 1207 belltower and the Lombard crypt. The amphitheatre has meanwhile stayed in use: fireworks and a torchlight procession inside it every 17 September, the Mercatantia medieval festival across the park for three days in late July, and Festival Barocco concerts in summer.

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