How Was Viterbo Built

Everything here is peperino, and it sets the mood: a dark grey stone that weathers almost black, so Viterbo reads as severe even in sunshine. It is local, it cuts cleanly, and it was used for walls, paving, doorframes and fountains alike.

The San Pellegrino quarter is the clearest surviving picture of a thirteenth-century Italian town. Its distinguishing feature is the profferlo: an external stone staircase rising from the street to a first-floor doorway, leaving the ground floor as a workshop or store. Hundreds survive, and they are the reason the streets look the way they do — houses turned outward, with the life of the building on display.

The quarter is also full of covered passages and arches spanning the lanes, which braced buildings against earthquakes and added rooms above the street.

The Palazzo dei Papi, built in the 1260s, is dominated by its loggia: a row of slender paired columns supporting delicate tracery, cantilevered out over the valley. Half of it collapsed in the fourteenth century and was never rebuilt, which is why the structure looks unfinished and, oddly, better for it.