Tuscania, a city of art and lavender
Hotel Tuscania Panoramico

What to see

The walls, you can see a good stretch along the road to Viterbo where you can also recognize the square, cylindrical and polygonal torrid lookouts.

Santa Maria del Riposo, welcomes a richly decorated sixteenth-century portal in its elegant facade. The interior houses a valuable altarpiece attributed to Perin del Vaga and a table by Pastura.

Etruscan National Museum. It occupies the premises of the convent attached to the church of S. Maria del Riposo and tells the story of Tuscania through the grave goods and sarcophagi of the most important families, Curunas and Vipinana who lived between the 5th and 1st centuries BC. The historical section relates to the ancient and medieval age, in which ample space has the architectural decorations from the necropolis of Madonna dell'Olivo and Carcarello.

Santa Maria della Rosa. Anticipated on largo Bixio by the church of S. Marco belli, the door with twisted columns and the remains of fourteenth-century frescoes kept inside, was the main church of Tuscania and preserves considerable remains of frescoes inside; in the right aisle, the coat of arms of Angelo Tartaglia, a mercenary captain who ruled at the beginning of the 15th century. In the nearby church of S. Silvestro, dating back to the end of the 13th century, there is a fourteenth-century fresco of the Tree of Life attributed to Gregorio and Donato d'Arezzo.

Santa Maria Maggiore. Built in Romanesque-Lombard style on the remains of a large pagan building, it was rebuilt in the 12th century and equipped with the current facade with three beautiful portals. In front, a massive Romanesque tower. Above the central portal of white marble a rose window with a double radial order of columns, also in white marble; a small rosette also crowns the richly carved side portals; the interior with three naves preserves in the right aisle a valuable octagonal font for immersion baptisms; in the central nave there is a very valuable 13th-century ambo with ancient decorative elements. Testimonies of the rich paintings are the Last Judgment.

The necropolis. The countryside around the inhabited area was used in the Roman Etruscan age in a funerary key '. The Olivo necropolis, named after the small church near Peschiera, Pian di Mole, and burials such as the Queen's tomb, so called perhaps a painting once visible on a wall in the room, are part of the vast complex of the cities of the dead. and the cube tomb, also interesting because it exactly reproduces an Etruscan house.

Worthy of note is the Abbey of San Giusto, about 4 km south of Tuscania, located in the valley of the river Marta. A valley once inhabited by Etruscans and Romans, where, in the mid-twelfth century, this abbey was built, designed like the Cistercian buildings, with church, tower, cloister, chapter house, parlor, scriptorium, refectory, cellarium.