Church of San Pietro
Church of San Pietro historical timeline
Last updated on October 8, 2026- 8th or 11th century The church is built, and which of those it is has been argued for a hundred years. Pietro Toesca put it in the eighth, the work of maestri comacini, when Charlemagne gave Tuscania to Pope Hadrian I -- which would make San Pietro the hinge between Early Christian and Romanesque building in Italy. Recent scholarship puts it in the eleventh, and in 1997 Renato Bonelli read it as reactionary rather than innovative. No documentary source survives to decide it.
- The date cut into the ciborium. On Toesca's reading it dates a rebuilding of an older church, whose traces are the scattered capitals and marble fragments and an older-looking stretch of the crypt kept as the core of the new work.
- Between the end of the twelfth century and the start of the thirteenth, the two bays are rebuilt and the present facade is put up -- the part of the building whose date nobody disputes.
- The first of four recorded campaigns of alteration, followed by 1450, 1500 and 1734.
- San Pietro ceases to be the cathedral of the diocese of Tuscania. Among the late antique and early medieval ruins beside it, nobody has established which was the bishop's palace.
- Repeated restorations run through the nineteenth century.
- An earthquake hits the province of Viterbo. It destroys the rose window and the Christ Pantocrator among angels that filled the apse, and badly damages the adjoining Palazzo dei Canonici, then the national archaeological museum, which is afterwards moved out.
- In December the Ministry of Culture takes over the running of the church, through the Polo museale del Lazio, which becomes the Direzione regionale Musei in December 2019.
Verified against Wikipedia, October 2026.