Civitella d'Agliano

Here castles do not fall from old age: they are pulled down, and sometimes put back up. In 1322 the comune of Orvieto ordered the castle of Civitella to be demolished, to punish the local lords who had lent a hand to the Ghibelline rebels of Orvieto; the following year, with the Monaldeschi driven out and the Guelph Orsini put in their place, the same comune of Orvieto ordered it to be rebuilt. The stones were the same, the tenant had changed — and indeed in 1329 the Monaldeschi came back and stayed. Two hundred years later the story repeats not far away: in 1522 Pope Adrian VI had the castle of Castel di Piero torn down, which Piero and Giovancarlo Baglioni, rival heirs, were disputing with their own militias, so as to make clear whose fief it really was. Of the castle there remains the baronial palace, in excellent condition.

The village stands on a crag of tuff sloping towards the valley of the Tiber, and around it are the calanchi, tongues of whitish clay that take from the landscape any resemblance to the countryside one expects. Inside the walls, beside the entrance arch, there are in fact two churches side by side — the parish church of Saints Peter and Callixtus and the Madonna delle Grazie — with a single eighteenth-century bell tower above the roofs of both. The odd thing is the facade: the one seen from the square, in small bricks and stone, was raised in 1940 and takes up a whole side; the real main entrance, on the other hand, is squeezed and halved by the parish house, and is oriented exactly east. The canvases inside are almost all by two hands only, Ludovico Mazzanti and Filippo Naldini, and this gives the church a unity that few village parish churches have.