> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # CIVITA DI BAGNOREGIO — THE INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE - URL: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/civita-di-bagnoregio-astra-zarina-restoration/ - Published: 2026-08-31T17:43:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-22T17:46:39.000Z - Description: There is a map of Civita no guidebook shows: everything that fell into the valley. A Latvian-American architect, a Sienese theorist and the engineers in the rock kept the rest standing, without pretending it was whole. - Author: Giulio Romano - Tags: Italy, Architecture, Restoration, Lazio, Travel There is a map of Civita di Bagnoregio that no guidebook will ever show you. It is the map of subtracted space — the geometric drawing of everything that has detached from the cliff and fallen into the canyon over the last four centuries. Palaces, streets, churches, entire neighbourhoods that existed and are now clay on the floor of the Valle dei Calanchi. [If the first post focused on the macro-scale of the territory](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/civita-di-bagnoregio-the-city-that-is-dying/), this one changes focal length. We need to look at the micro-scale: the restorations that allowed the village to survive, the theory that governs them, the interrupted streets that tell the story of what is no longer there. --- ## A Woman, a House, a Village In 1960 a young Latvian-American architect named Astra Zarina received the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. She was the first woman to receive it. She was thirty-one years old, born in Riga in 1929, had emigrated to the United States with her family after the war, graduated in architecture from the University of Washington in 1953 and then obtained a master's degree at MIT. Rome, for her, was a revelation. Not just the city — the territory around it. In the 1960s she began exploring the Tuscia, the villages perched on tufa cliffs, the landscapes that seemed frozen in time. Then she found Civita. In 1961, almost on impulse, she bought her first house in Civita di Bagnoregio — a single-room building with a large fireplace, half-ruined, in a village that then had a few dozen inhabitants and no visible prospect of a future. What she found was not a gleaming postcard: it was a town emptying out, with failing walls, collapsed roofs, streets that ended in the void of the cliff. A place the world had decided to let die. Zarina decided otherwise. With great humility — as Giovanni Attili recalls, who devoted an entire chapter of his book on Civita to her — she learned the local construction techniques, learned to work the peperino and tufa extracted from the collapses, listened to the remaining inhabitants. She did not arrive with a project to impose: she arrived with the willingness to understand how that place had been built, and to let it speak. --- ## The Zarina Method: Restoration as Critical Act Zarina's work at Civita has a precise theoretical coherence, even if she herself would probably not have described it in these terms. It is the method of conservative restoration — the one that in Italy had found its most rigorous theoretical formulation a few years earlier, in 1963, with the publication of Cesare Brandi's *Teoria del Restauro*. Brandi was Sienese, founder and director of the Istituto Centrale del Restauro from 1939 to 1960\. His central thesis is simple in formulation and radical in its implications: "only the matter of the work of art is restored." You do not reconstruct, you do not imagine what it might have been, you do not invent a fake antiquity. You intervene on the existing matter to consolidate it, to halt its decay, to transmit it to the future. "Restoration must aim at re-establishing the potential unity of the work of art, provided this is possible without committing an artistic or historical forgery and without erasing any trace of the passage of the work of art through time." The Romantic adage of "as it was, where it was" — rebuilding exactly what had been lost, in the same position and with the same materials — was for Brandi "the negation of the very principle of restoration, an offence to history and an outrage to aesthetics." The time elapsed is part of the work, not a defect to correct. Patina, absence, lacuna — these are historical testimonies that restoration must respect, not erase. Zarina worked in exactly this spirit. She consolidated surviving walls without inventing what was missing. She used local materials — dark peperino, tufa, lime — not for formal mimicry but because they were the materials with which that fabric had been built, and the only respectful way to intervene was to use the same material grammar. Where a wall had lost its upper section, she consolidated it to the existing limit without raising it. Where a vault had collapsed, she left the space open and reinforced the surviving arch. The result was not a remade village — it was a consolidated village, one that clearly showed the signs of time without being ashamed of them. ![Tufa wall of a house in Civita di Bagnoregio with two blocked arches and a wooden door, the stones left visible](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/civita-zarina-02-consolidated-wall.jpg) A wall consolidated to its surviving height, the blind arches left as they were: the Zarina method, if you know how to look. --- ## The School as Building Site In 1976 Zarina launched the first Italian Hilltowns summer programme at the University of Washington, based in Civita di Bagnoregio. For decades she brought her American students to live in the village — not to visit it, to live in it. The students worked with local families, documented the buildings, surveyed the streets, analysed the urban fabric from its morphological layout to the constructive detail of furniture. Making became a space of collective learning. Each student developed a specific research project: some focused on the use of public spaces, some on the ethnographic analysis of the community, some on the constructive detail of a staircase or a window. The goal was not to produce documents for an archive — it was to imagine a future for Civita, to reweave the connection between the village and its valley, to understand how a place can continue to exist without surrendering to the logic of abandonment or tourist transformation. In 1981 Zarina founded the NIAUSI — Northwest Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy — today known as The Civita Institute, a non-profit organisation headquartered in Seattle and in its historic buildings in Civita, where her library and archives are preserved. Among her most distinguished students is Steven Holl, today one of the most important architects in the world, who paid tribute to his teacher with the *Belvedere Astra Zarina* — a bronze and stone sculpture in Civita, four intersecting spheres representing the different areas of Zarina's influence as architect, scholar and citizen of the world. When Zarina died in 2008, a stray cat was sitting on the open threshold of the church of San Donato in Civita. Her assistant Jennifer Wilkin, who was there, said that "Astra loved cats and would have loved this feline farewell." This is not a sentimental detail — it is the portrait of a person who had chosen to bind her life to a place, not just to a project. --- ## The Topography of the Void When you walk along the perimeter alleys of Civita, you will encounter streets that stop abruptly, ending in the void behind a simple iron railing. That is not a panoramic viewpoint. It is the visible scar of an urban amputation. In the late Middle Ages the village was much more extensive than the island we see today. It was protected by five access gates well distributed around the perimeter — today only one remains, the Porta Santa Maria. Around the central piazza orbited entire residential neighbourhoods. Over the centuries, the catastrophic collapses of the edge of the tufa plate literally swallowed these zones, making them disappear into the canyon along with their churches, their artisan workshops and their streets. An architect learns to read this topography of the void. The space that today separates Civita from the surrounding calanchi is not just untouched nature: it is a previously built volume that geology has removed. The palaces that today face directly onto the precipice were designed to stand at the centre of a city block, protected by other houses that no longer exist. The current village is the hard core of a structure that contracted in order to survive its own foundation. This reading has an important consequence for anyone thinking about Civita's restoration: it is not just about consolidating existing buildings, but about understanding the geometry of the lost territory. Knowing what was missing allows you to understand what is there, to read the structural tensions of the edge, to understand why certain walls are thicker and certain portals more robust — they were the margins of a denser fabric, and their robustness is the reason they survived when the rest fell. ![A narrow lane in Civita di Bagnoregio between two walls ending at an iron railing, with the calanchi valley beyond in winter haze](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/civita-zarina-04-street-ending-at-the-void.jpg) A street that ends in a railing. Not a viewpoint: the scar of a neighbourhood that fell into the valley. --- ## The Lubriano Front and the Engineering of the Saddle To fully understand the fragility of the system you need to turn your back to Civita and look east, to the other side of the Valle dei Calanchi. There stands Lubriano, a village resting on the exact same geological transition: a plate of volcanic tufa suspended above a base of unstable clays. The visual dialogue between these two villages suspended in the void reveals the true scale of the engineering problem. The consolidation works do not end at the cliff of Civita — they must extend to the entire clay saddle connecting the two sides of the canyon. The landslide movements of Lubriano influence the underground water flows that then undermine the base of Civita, and vice versa. The two valley edges condition each other, and an intervention on only one of them without taking into account the other can accelerate the degradation of the other. Territory engineers work on both banks simultaneously. The steel tendons that penetrate the tufa to anchor themselves to the deep, more stable layers are not just a local intervention on a single building — they are elements of a containment network covering the entire saddle, holding together the pieces of a landscape that nature has decided to divide. Brandi wrote that "restoration must concern only the matter of which the work of art is made." At Civita, the matter of the work is the entire landscape — the cliff, the saddle, the calanchi, Lubriano on the other bank. You cannot restore Civita without restoring the valley. --- ## Consolidation as Critical Act There is one last thing to say about the restoration of Civita, and it is the most difficult to accept. The modern consolidation — the micropiles, the steel tendons, the drainage wells — is not invisible. It does not blend with the ancient stone, it does not pretend to be something it is not. It is steel and concrete in medieval rock, and anyone who looks carefully will see it. This is correct. It is exactly what Brandi prescribed: every addition must be distinguishable from the original matter, in order not to create historical forgeries. Honest restoration declares itself — it uses clearly contemporary materials, applies clearly different techniques, does not seek to imitate what was there before. The boundary between ancient and new must be legible, not hidden. At Civita this principle applies at an unusual scale. It is not about distinguishing a new pointing in a fresco, or a replacement piece of marble in a sculpture. It is about distinguishing the geotechnical engineering intervention from the body of the cliff. But the principle is the same: the transparency of the intervention is a form of respect for history, not a defect to be corrected. The village we see today is the result of this double work — Zarina's work on the surface masonry and the engineers' work in the rock below. Two different scales, two different materials, the same principle: consolidate without falsifying, preserve without inventing, transmit to the future without lying to the past. ![The tufa cliff below Civita di Bagnoregio with an orange construction fence at its base, blue sky above](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/civita-zarina-07-works-at-the-foot-of-the-cliff.jpg) The foot of the cliff, with the fences of the consolidation works: the part of Civita that is engineering, and does not pretend otherwise. --- ## Before You Leave The Museo Geologico e delle Frane di Civita di Bagnoregio, in Palazzo Alemanni Mazzocchi on the main piazza, documents the evolution and geology of the territory, the instability processes and the monitoring and stabilisation works. It is one of the most unusual museums in the Tuscia — it exhibits not works of art but data, maps, geological sections, landslide models. For an architect it is more interesting than many civic museums. The Civita Institute has its headquarters in the buildings restored by Zarina. It is not open to the public as a museum, but organises programmes, residencies and conferences. The website is civitainstitute.org. Giovanni Attili's book *Civita. Senza aggettivi e senza altre specificazioni* (Quodlibet, 2020) is the most complete and most honest reference on Civita available today. It is not a tourist guide — it is an essay that weaves together history, urbanism, sociology and personal memory. Worth the price for the chapter on Astra Zarina alone. --- ## Further Reading Cesare Brandi's *Teoria del Restauro* (1963, new edition La Nave di Teseo, 2022) is the foundation text for everything in this post. It is short — under two hundred pages — and dense. The key passages on the "unity of the work of art" and the principle of reversibility are worth reading slowly. For the official ICR reference on Brandi's principles as applied in Italian practice, the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro maintains a portal at espi.icr.beniculturali.it. Giovanni Attili's *Civita. Senza aggettivi e senza altre specificazioni* (Quodlibet, 2020) is the book that does for Civita what this post only gestures toward — a full account of Astra Zarina's work, the sociology of the village's transformation, and the question of what it means to preserve a place without preserving its people. The Civita Institute — Zarina's organisation, now a nonprofit — maintains archives and programmes at civitainstitute.org. Not a tourist resource, but the right place if you want to go deeper into her work and legacy.