A country on the cliff

Could Italy simply fade away? What 'The Dying City' can teach an aging nation

That Civita di Bagnoregio ranks high among Italy’s most beautiful villages may be the least surprising thing about it.

The ancient town clings stubbornly to colorful cliffsides of layered volcanic tuff and sandstone and is connected to the rest of the world by a single umbilical cord of a footbridge. It looks like a mirage, a floating ochre-colored citadel.

Step through its oversized gate and the town doesn’t hum with life, it exhales it. Time stretches out between the tolls of the hourly church bells.

Civita di Bagnoregio (C Moncada photo. IG: @doricromia)

“In the early mornings or the evenings, the time when most of the tourists are gone, that’s when you can feel the weight of the town’s history,” Marco De Petrillo, a Civita resident, told me.

De Petrillo, 62, was born in Rome. But eight years ago, he and his wife Ilaria Rossi Doria moved to Civita to escape what he called “the chaos and stress” of the capital. They took over the sprawling three-story Palazzo Contino, which Ilaria’s archeologist grandfather bought in the 1970s, and now rent rooms to visitors. De Petrillo said the 16th-century structure is in constant need of maintenance.

“As soon as you finish work on one floor you have to start on the next one,” he said. “It never finishes.”