Tuscania Culture

Tuscania's culture is Etruscan at the root and ecclesiastical in the middle, with a long stretch of diminishment in between.

The Etruscan layer is unusually legible because of its scale: twelve distinct rock-cut necropoleis across the territory, and an acropolis on the hill of San Pietro that now lies outside the town's own walls.

The name itself is a Roman verdict on that identity. Tuscana means the territory or city of the Tusci — the Romans' word for the Etruscans — so the modern town carries a Roman label for an Etruscan place.

The ecclesiastical layer is early and was then taken away. Tuscania became one of the first bishopric sees in Italy in the fifth century or earlier, and lost that primacy to Viterbo from 1192 onwards, with the bishopric eventually merged into the Viterbo diocese.

And the civic memory includes a humiliation: after a failed expedition against Boniface VIII the town submitted to Rome and carried a diminutive name — Toscanella — for six centuries, until 1911.

Francis of Assisi passed through in 1222, which links it to Greccio at the other end of the region.