Calcata, the village suspended in time

 

We had often heard about Calcata together with Civita di Bagnoregio. In fact, these two villages, both perched on the tuff cliffs that characterize the landscape of Viterbo’s Tuscia, share the nickname “the dying town” due to depopulation over time happened to frequent collapses.

A weekend to discover the village

But then over time Calcata Vecchia, abandoned by its inhabitants who settled a short distance away in a modern center called Calcata Nuova, was reborn thanks to a group of people, including artists, artisans and intellectuals, from all over the world who they have chosen as their home. So today Calcata is divided in two: in the old live the “new” inhabitants, in the new, the natives.

This is the story. Calcata, a settlement that at the time of Emperor Hadrian was a center of agricultural production in the service of Rome, began to depopulate in the early 1900s due to the continuous collapse of the tuff cliff. And in the Fascist era it risked disappearing due to a royal decree of 1935 that wanted it to be demolished, given the instability of the mountain on which it rests and from which it dominates the Treja valley.

But in the seventies of the last century the village was “invaded” and occupied by artists from the United States, Belgium and Holland, who chose Calcata Vecchia as a retreat to live out of the chaos and open a shop. Until the nineties, the new inhabitants, who took care of renovating and consolidating the foundations of the houses, were considered illegal, but then a decree law was issued which sanctioned its habitability. Among the first to move to Calcata in 1973, the architect Paolo Portoghesi, who built the garden and a library for the town.

Today the myth of the city of artists and intellectuals attracts crowds of tourists who go up to the old town leaving their cars in the parking lot located in the new area and facing a walking path in nature that offers wonderful views of the village. Passing under the imposing open access portal between the medieval crenellated walls that leads to the small square dominated by the Church of SS. Name of Jesus and the baronial palace.

Once you cross the arch, you are enveloped in a magical atmosphere, without chaos and frenzy and projected into a timeless era. Because in reality Calcata presents itself today as a center of urban, social and cultural experimentation, as those who chose to live here more than 40 years ago and who made it a treasure chest of art, nature, explained to us during our walks. peace and good living 40 kilometers from Rome. So much so that in 2018 it obtained the orange flag of the Touring Club, the environmental tourism quality mark for the hinterland.

Houses seem to arise directly from the rock, which from a distance appears as an isolated circular drum bordered by deep ravines rich in vegetation. After the first gate, a short and narrow climb set between walls and rock and enclosed between two gates, leads to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, the heart of Calcata where there are unique thrones in local tuff made by the artist Costantino Morosin that suggest the Chairs of the Devil, one of the many natural phenomena of the Treja valley.

The Church of SS. Name of Jesus where, in a precious sixteenth-century reliquary a singular relic was kept. And here history and legend are inextricably intertwined, even being mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses and by Stendhal in The Keys of St. Peter. It was the foreskin of the child Jesus delivered, it is said, to Charlemagne by an angel. The emperor then entrusted the precious relic to the Sancta Sanctorum of the Lateran, the medieval residence of the popes.

According to the documentation of the Vatican archives during the sack of Rome in 1527, the sacred relic, the only biological specimen of Christ, was stolen by a lansquenet, who stopped in Calcata due to the worsening of his health conditions. Before he died he dug a hole and hid the casket there. The legend says that for 30 years the donkeys that passed from there knelt, until in 1557 the villagers dug and found the precious relic which was exposed to popular devotion.

The Vatican even granted a plenary indulgence to those who went to Calcata to pay homage to the relic. In the early 1900s, however, it was considered inconvenient by the clergy and the cult was suspended. Then, in the 1980s, the ampoule disappeared. For the official version, Christ’s foreskin was stolen. According to the unofficial one, it is the Vatican that requisitioned it to put an end to an “embarrassing” cult.

In addition to the church, dominating the square and the village is the Baronial Palace which belonged to the noble Anguillara family which today houses the offices of the Valle del Treja Regional Park.

From here, you are happy to get lost in alleys and streets paved with large river pebbles, colored by flowers and squeezed between high walls and steep slopes that lead to the rocky spurs and the surrounding greenery of the ravines, deep vertical walls carved by the waters in the volcanic rocks and tuffaceous typical of the Viterbo’s Tuscia.

The paths from the village lead to the underground passage of the Secret door, an escape route during sieges, and immerse themselves in the Treja valley with accessible itineraries perfect for hiking and trekking even with four-legged companions.

But if being tourists in Calcata Vecchia, one of the places that according to CNN and the Guardian you must visit absolutely and among the 10 most beautiful destinations on the peninsula, it is beautiful, living there is not easy, because the village is often cold and constantly to be monitored, to prevent small landslides from undermining the stability of the entire town.

So we admired those who, like Luca, decide to open his Alkimie Coffee & Wine, where together with our Otto we had breakfast every morning and enjoyed an aperitif on the terrace overlooking the gorge during our stay. And even more appreciable is the all-female project Opera Calcata (which we are talking about here) which is aimed at a conscious tourism capable of loving the country as well as its “adoptive” inhabitants.