Practical Information for visiting Viterbo

The walled centre is compact and best walked; it is also steep in places and paved in stone that is slick when wet. Nothing inside the walls needs transport.

City buses connect the centre to the railway stations and out to the thermal area west of town, which is about three kilometres and a dull walk along a road — worth taking the bus or a taxi.

A car is genuinely useful here, and more so than in most Italian cities, because the reason to stay is the surrounding Tuscia: the Etruscan necropolises, the villa gardens and the crater lakes are poorly served by public transport and close together by road.

Cotral buses reach the larger towns of the province and the lakes, but schedules are sparse and often built around school hours rather than visitors.

Viterbo is about eighty kilometres from Rome and slower to reach than that suggests. Regional trains run from Roma Ostiense and Trastevere in roughly an hour and three quarters, and Cotral coaches from Saxa Rubra take a similar time. There is no fast connection and no motorway directly to the city; the A1 passes to the east at Orte, which is the usual road approach and also a mainline rail interchange worth knowing about. Rome’s airports are the gateways, both requiring a transfer through the city.

Viterbo is a quiet provincial city with low crime and little to warn about beyond ordinary care around the stations.

The old town’s peperino paving is genuinely slippery when wet, and the lanes are steep and uneven. It is the most likely cause of an injury here.

The thermal water emerges at around fifty-eight degrees and is cooled only by distance from the source. The pools nearest the spring are hot enough to scald, they are unsupervised, and people do misjudge them — test before getting in, and do not stay long in the hotter ones.

In the countryside, the gorge paths to the Etruscan sites are unmarked in places, have no phone signal in the bottom, and are overgrown in summer. Tell someone where you are going.

No vaccinations or special precautions are needed and tap water is safe to drink. Pharmacies are throughout the centre with a rota for nights and holidays.

Viterbo has a large provincial hospital, Belcolle, on the edge of the city. Rome’s major facilities are under two hours away. EU and UK visitors should carry a valid EHIC or GHIC.

The sulphur springs are the one local consideration: the water is naturally hot and strongly mineralised, which is not advisable for people with heart conditions or in pregnancy, and the smell is unmistakable but harmless.

The single emergency number across Italy is 112, covering police, fire and ambulance, with English-speaking operators. 118 still reaches medical services directly.

In the gorges and at the rural Etruscan sites, mobile coverage is poor to absent in the valley bottoms; the same number reaches mountain and cave rescue once you have signal.

Carabinieri and municipal police are inside the walls. Consulates are in Rome.