The origin of Viterbo is as mysterious as the source of the Nile. An Etruscan city is known to have stood upon its site; it contains positions of great strength, tongues of hill, guarded by gorges, well suited to the Etruscan style of fortification; and it stands at the Etrurian gate of the Great Ciminian Forest, the chief obstacle which the Romans had to pierce for the subjugation of Etruria. So, putting aside the stupid forgeries of Annio of Viterbo, who 'claimed for his native city an antiquity greater than that of Troy,' it is curious that the Vetus Urbs is not mentioned before the eighth century, when the old chroniclers speak of an ancient castle—castrum Viterbii—standing on the present site of the cathedral. But from the year 773, when it attracted the attention of Desiderius, the last King of the Lombards, who made it the base of his intended conquest of the States of the Church, has its history been interwoven with that of the Papacy.
Little is known of Viterbo in Lombard times, for all the grandeur of her Lombard walls, which were many times thrown down and built up again in her constant warfare with Rome. It was not until the beginning of the twelfth century that she sprang into importance in mediaeval history as the capital of the Patrimony, bequeathed by the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany to the occupants of the Chair of St. Peter, assuming the rôle of a fully-armed Minerva springing from the brow of Jove, because her lofty position made her a fortress for the Popes in time of peril from the sword, and a sanatorium in seasons of pestilence. In the twelfth century Eugenius III. summoned the vassals of the Church to assemble in Viterbo, and in the thirteenth century five popes were elected within her walls, and four popes died there; in 1240 Frederick II. was living in peace in Viterbo; and five years later the city inscribed the most glorious page in her annals when the great Emperor was humiliated by her heroic defence against his onslaughts and forced to retreat into Pisan territory. But her power decayed from the end of the thirteenth century, when Honorius IV., in removing the interdict which his predecessor had laid on the city for the outrages committed in the papal elections, decreed that she was to raze her fortifications, lose her jurisdiction, and yield her rectorate to Rome. Later, we find Urban V. staying in the Rocca when he returned from Avignon, the mediaeval Babylon, in answer to the exhortations of Petrarch; and here died the great soldier and statesman, Cardinal Gil d'Albornoz, before the Pope continued his unwilling journey to Rome. But it is chiefly as a city of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we regard Viterbo to-day; for in those stormy years which saw the rise and fall of the great house of Hohenstaufen, the fate of Viterbo was synonymous with that of the Papacy, and it is to this period that most of her mediaeval monuments belong.
Viterbo: mediaeval house in the Piazza S. Lorenzo.
Coming from Orvieto we found Viterbo very gay and gracious, with exquisite fountains making music in all her piazzas, and her mediaeval streets full of the merry air of vintage time. Already the great vats had been cleansed, and we had encountered enormous barrels groaning and rumbling down the hills as they were rolled to the fountains to be soused and sweetened by sun and air, or tumbled back to their accustomed cellars. All day long the yoked oxen swung slowly in through the ancient gates, drawing carts filled with barrels of fruit; and in front of more than one humble osteria we found a group of men and girls singing and laughing as they pressed the grapes with bare white feet, up and down, up and down, while the dark fluid flowed through a conduit into the vats below. This alone would have made us love Viterbo, just as we still carry gentle memories of Mantua, not so much for its great castles of the Gonzaga, as for the beautiful simplicity of the vintage which we watched being brought home to that city of arcades from the fields round Virgil's home not many autumns ago.
VITERBO: THE MOAT OUTSIDE THE PORTA SAN PIETRO.
But Viterbo, 'the Nuremberg of Italy,' is full of charm. She is one of the most mediaeval cities in Italy; she has a whole quarter of thirteenth-century houses cheek by jowl with barons' towers and ancient churches; she has exquisite cloisters like that of Santa Maria della Verità, where the recent Camorra trial was held; and on the hill where the ancient castle of Viterbo stood she cherishes a gem of Gothic architecture—the Palazzo Vescovile, which was once the palace of the popes.