Ciao Cevita. Nothing Lasts Forever.

Sinking Italian hill town appeals to architects for help
By Peter Popham in Rome
Published: 11 May 2007

The mayor of a 2,500-year-old Italian hill town that is listed as one of the world's 100 most endangered monuments has appealed to the world's architects to save the town from being cut off from the outside world.

The original bridge joining Civita to the rest of Italy was destroyed by German bombing in the Second World War. A long, steep, narrow concrete bridge replaced it in the 1960s, but like the rest of the town this is threatened by subsidence.

At a meeting on Wednesday the mayor, Erino Pompei, told the handful of remaining villagers: "We've posted an international tender on the internet, inviting the world's best architects to come up with an innovative and eco-friendly solution to our problem."

Civita, which was founded by the Etruscans, juts out above the lunar landscape of northern Lazio, a teetering volcanic plug among frozen waves of eroded tufa stone reminiscent of the bandit-haunted ravines of northern India. Civita is doomed and knows it. The road signs on the way up read La città che muore, the dying city. The volcanic tufa stone on which the town sits is founded on a treacherous base of clay. As the clay slowly but ineluctably heads south, the town's homes are gradually wrenched apart.

But now the town is fighting back. In addition to the bridge initiative, officials have commissioned an ambitious scheme to sink concrete shafts deep into the mountain, creating a skeleton that they hope will keep the rock intact.

While the town waits for ideas for a new bridge, Mr Pompei has suggested looking back a few decades for ways to make life less arduous. The town's permanent population has plummeted from 1,700 a few decades ago to about 15 now.

But second home owners from America and northern Europe have partly taken their place, and in summer tourists stream across the bridge in their thousands to admire the former cathedral, the birthplace of the town's one celebrity, the 14th-century Franciscan St Bonaventure, and the medieval homes built on Etruscan foundations. To make their visits both more comfortable and more memorable, Mr Pompei recommends a return to the only form of transport that really makes sense in these precipitous valleys. "We're thinking of dusting off some of the mule tracks and ferrying visitors up on donkeys," he announced.

The villagers liked the idea. They pointed out that St Bonaventure used them. But Mr Pompei made clear that the return of asses was not an alternative to a new bridge. "They should be combined with other solutions to the town's access problems," he said, "which must have the smallest possible impact on the environment and landscape."

A donkey shuttle service for the summer visitors would add another touch of history to a corner of central Italy that is already brimming with the stuff. Tourists who know their Italian cinema would spot the quotation from Fellini's Oscar-winning film La Strada, in which Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina jogged along Civita's stony lanes on asses.