Overview
A bare space, just outside the walls of Tuscania, houses the Basilica of San Pietro, one of the most prestigious medieval monuments in Lazio, built on top of a hill on which the Etruscan acropolis once stood, cleverly positioned on the highest hill of the city.
Skirting the sensational mass of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, you can reach the base of the Basilica of San Pietro after a few steps. Looking from afar at the two tall towers that announce the entrance to the complex, the feeling is that of having entered a place that belongs to the whole of history rather than to a specific period in the past. In fact, several styles and motifs testify to the transition from early Christian to Romanesque art, through centuries of reconstructions that overlap in the basilica's current appearance.
The thirteenth-century façade boasts a marble doorway, rich in reliefs and mosaics, dominated by a refined central rose window; you have to access the internal naves to admire an even more evocative architectural structure, composed of massive columns surmounted by elegant capitals. Walking around the original floor that still decorates the central nave, you finally reach the crypt, a surprising underground space, supported by a jungle of columns created by reusing cuts of Roman and early medieval stones.
