Church of San Donato site features

San Donato stands on the main square of Civita, facing the old communal palace, on what was historically the centre of the village's plan -- a plan that is Etruscan in origin, laid out on cardi and decumani and then inherited by Rome, with everything built on top of it medieval and Renaissance. The church is Romanesque in origin, with a nave and two aisles behind a Renaissance façade.

The façade and the tower

The front was reworked in 1511 and given its central portal in 1524 and the two side portals in 1547 -- so the face of the building took thirty-six years to finish. The bell tower is a plain tower, and two Etruscan sarcophagi of basalt are built into its base: the oldest things in the building by some two thousand years, and a reminder that the chamber tombs cut into the cliffs below were once far more numerous than they are now.

The crucifix

Inside is the wooden SS. Crocifisso, the object the whole year turns on here. On Good Friday it is taken down in a ceremony inside the church and laid on a bier, to be carried in Bagnoregio's centuries-old Good Friday procession. Legend attaches it to the plague that struck the territory around Bagnoregio in 1499: a pious woman who came daily to pray before the image heard a voice assuring her that her prayers had been granted and the pestilence would shortly end -- which it did, a few days later, at the same time as her own death.

What stands nearby

The square and the lanes around it hold Palazzo Alemanni, now the Museo Geologico e delle Frane -- the museum of geology and landslides, which on this site is a museum about the ground the town is standing on -- the Palazzo Vescovile, a sixteenth-century mill, and the remains of the birthplace of St Bonaventure.

Two Etruscan sarcophagi in the campanile

Basalt, built into the base of the bell tower. They predate the church they hold up by roughly two thousand years.

The SS. Crocifisso

The wooden crucifix kept inside, taken down on Good Friday and carried on a bier in Bagnoregio's Good Friday procession. Its legend ties it to the plague of 1499 and a woman who heard it answer her.

A façade finished over thirty-six years

Reworked into a Renaissance front in 1511, given its central portal in 1524 and its two side portals in 1547.

The 1511 rebuilding

To a design by Nicola Matteucci of Caprarola, the eastern wall, the two choirs, the crypt and the high altar were all demolished and replaced by the present presbytery and choir -- the east end of a Romanesque cathedral removed in one campaign.

National monument since 1940

Two and a half centuries after losing the bishop, the building was listed in its own right.

The square it faces

Historically the centre of the village's plan, which is Etruscan in origin -- cardi and decumani, later Roman, under an entirely medieval and Renaissance architectural dress. The old communal palace stands opposite.