The patron saint of Tarquinia is Our Lady of Valverde, whose icon, which arrived from the Holy Land in 1189 at the time of the Third Crusade, is kept in the church of Santa Maria di Valverde: members of the «Devoti SS Madonna di Valverde» association carry it in solemn procession every year on 8 May. The first historical records of the church, whose exact construction date remains unknown although it probably dates from the 12th century, go back to 1268, when some friars of the Order of the Brothers of Mary in Valle Viridis settled in the attached convent; their main convent was in Flanders, near Brussels, in a valley called precisely Valverde. The complex was raised to diocesan sanctuary on 8 December 1984 by Bishop Girolamo Grillo, and today its custody is entrusted to the municipality of Tarquinia.
The ancient Etruscan town stood on the Civita plateau, separated from today's settlement by the Monterozzi plateau, home to the great necropolis listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Tarquinia was one of the main cities of the Etruscan Dodecapolis, and ancient tradition credited it with a founding role for the whole of Etruscan civilisation: according to myth, it was here that the boy Tages, wise as an old man, appeared and revealed to the Etruscans their religious discipline, so much so that the ancients considered the town the very cradle of Etruscan religion. It was also from Tarquinia, according to the tradition linked to the Corinthian merchant Demaratus, that the Tarquin dynasty set out to seize power in Rome.
