Porta Santa Maria historical timeline

Five gates, one survivor. The Porta di Santa Maria -- also called della Cava -- is the last of the five that let into ancient Civita, and the other four went the way the cliff went. It is cut through tufa under a tower with a small arcaded loggia on top, and over the arch two lions each hold a human head between their paws, put there in memory of a popular revolt by the people of Civita against the Monaldeschi of Orvieto. A visitor today walks under a rebellion to reach a village of about ten people.

Chronology

1. 6th c. B.C. The Etruscans found Civita on one of the oldest roads in Italy, joining the Tiber to Lake Bolsena, and lay out the grid of cardi and decumani that this gate still opens onto. Five gates served that settlement. The Etruscan name of the town is unknown, probably through the damnatio memoriae Rome applied after conquering Etruria.
2. 280 B.C. Earth tremors and landslips strike. The Etruscans embank rivers and cut drainage channels in response -- the start of a losing argument with the ground that eventually costs four of the five gates.
3. 265 B.C. The Romans arrive and extend the canalisation and torrent containment on an imposing scale. Neglected after antiquity, the works stop holding the hill, the territory degrades quickly, and Civita empties.
4. 1497 The two lions over the arch are carved, each with a human head between its paws, in memory of a popular revolt by the inhabitants of Civita against the Monaldeschi, the Orvieto family that held the town. They are still the first thing above a visitor's head on the way in.
5. c. 1550 The eagle with its own carved head is added, roughly half a century after the lions -- so what reads as one programme over the gate was assembled in two campaigns.
6. 1965 The reinforced-concrete footbridge is built, and this gate becomes the point every arrival passes through, reached on foot from Bagnoregio.
7. 2005 The calanchi of Civita are proposed as a Site of Community Importance, protecting the eroding ground that took the other four gates.
8. 2013 Passing through the gate becomes chargeable in June, at 5 euros for access to the borgo. The receipts are enough to abolish communal taxes in Civita and in Bagnoregio.
9. 2025 About ten people live inside the gate, which remains the main and effectively the only access -- the alternative being the Bucaione, the tunnel cut in the rock up from the Valle dei Calanchi.

Survival and restoration

The question here is not why this gate was restored but why it is the one still standing. Civita's base layer is an older marine clay, particularly prone to erosion, under upper layers of tufaceous and lavic material; water takes the clay out and the tufa above it follows. Four of the five gates have gone that way, along with most of the Etruscan chamber tombs once visible at the base of the cliff and the neighbouring tufa walls. The Porta di Santa Maria survives because of where on the outcrop it happens to sit.

What is being lost now is the carving rather than the structure. The lions, the heads and the eagle are relief in tufa -- the softest building stone in common use -- worked in 1497 and about 1550 and exposed at the one point in the village that every single person passes through. The arch is also, still, the working front door: residents' shopping, post and building materials come through it on foot, because the bridge beyond it is pedestrian except for the cycles and motorcycles the comune permits residents and authorised persons at set times.

Since June 2013 the 5-euro access charge levied at this gate has funded the comune that maintains it. In 2005 the landscape that destroyed its four siblings was proposed as a Site of Community Importance.

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