Calcata

Calcata sits on a tufa cliff above the Treja valley, forty kilometers north of Rome. The Anguillara family walled and castled it in the 13th century. In 1935 the Italian government condemned the village as structurally unsafe and ordered residents to move down to the new town in the valley below.

Most did. The empty houses on the cliff were re-occupied by artists, hippies and a small bohemian community from the late 1960s onward; they cleared the alleys, opened studios and bars, and turned an officially uninhabitable village into one of Lazio's strangest functioning settlements. The Holy Foreskin relic of Jesus was kept in the parish church here from 1527, taken from the Sancta Sanctorum during the Sack of Rome, and was an active object of pilgrimage until the relic was stolen in 1983 and the Vatican suppressed its cult. Calcata Vecchia is now a single street of workshops on a cliff edge above the Parco della Valle del Treja.

From Rome (FCO), about 1h 42m by car.

Naples / Salerno (NAP) is about 3 hours away.

By car from the centre of Perugia 2 hours or Siena 2h 29m.

Coming by train into Roma Termini? Calcata is about 1h 10m away by road.

Every town within reach of Rome airport.