TUSCANIA is in several ways outshone by her larger neighbour Viterbo; the town boasts no celebrated papal palace and fostered no local school of painters. Yet of the two cities it is perhaps Tuscania that draws one back. The Etruscan Tuscana was absorbed by her Roman successor, which was in turn occupied by the Lungobards in 574. It is to their rule, which ended in 774, that the glory of Tuscania, San Pietro, is due. Tuscania’s subsequent history was complicated, but in 1443 Cardinal Vitelleschi finally enforced papal control.
Tuscania’s importance diminished, and the medieval city – its confines marked by the extant walls – was larger than its immediate successor. There is abundant evidence of the strata of the town’s history – the restrained late Romanesque façade of Santa Maria della Rosa, the medieval Palazzo Spagnoli and the Quattrocento Palazzetto Farnese nearby. The commercial acumen of the painters of Siena is implied by a polyptych by Andrea di Bartolo in the rebuilt Duomo, while the one surviving chapel of San Francesco – the nave of which is now an open-air restaurant – was frescoed in 1466 by the brothers Sparapane from Norcia, provincial masters who here reveal an unexpected affinity with the Sienese Giovanni di Paolo. The later strata too have charm, none more than the stuccoed Supercinema of 1928 with an inscription to remind us that it was built in the sixth year of the Fascist era.
To the south of the town are the two churches that even in the nineteenth century drew visitors to Toscanello, as it was then known. Santa Maria Maggiore is set below the walls, its façade opposite a massive bell-tower. Originally the eighth-century cathedral, the church was largely reconstructed in the twelfth century and reconsecrated in 1206. It is built in a greyish tufa, but white marble was used to effect on the façade. This is enriched by a central lunette with the Madonna and Child and other subjects, and surmounted above a blind arcade by a superb rose window. The lateral portals also are richly decorated. Despite the earthquake of 1971 that damaged so many of the monuments of Tuscania, the interior has a timeless quality. For there is nothing to distract us from the early font, the reconstructed pulpit and the partly frescoed ciborium. The whole is dominated by the frescoed Last Judgement above the arch of the central apse.
Further south, on a hill upon which the Romans built over the Etruscan settlement, is San Pietro. The way climbs steeply, allowing the eye to linger on the apse, which like that of Santa Maria Maggiore faces north. The visitor passes the complex and then turns into the enclosure. The façade of the church is set back, flanked on the right by the annexed range of the former episcopal palace, which is balanced to the west by two tall towers. Although restored in 1876, the early thirteenth-century façade is thoroughly convincing. The central portal is surmounted by a rose window with symbols of the Evangelists and reliefs which include a particularly disturbing demon. The interior is essentially an eleventh-century remodelling of the original eighth-century Lungobard structure, fusing thus post-Roman with Romanesque forms. The great indented arches of the nave are borne on capitals, some of which were evidently reused – Corinthian, a bastard Ionic and composite – and high above these runs a blind arcade. The late twelfth-century Cosmati floor is unusually well preserved and complements the two earlier ciboria and the intricately decorated marble panels of the screen, survivors of the Lungobard scheme. Below the presbytery is the crypt, with an ordered copse of reused Roman columns. Despite the earthquake, San Pietro remains a wonderfully satisfying building.
San Pietro.