- Ingrid D. Rowland –
we can admire the way in which this ingenious fi fteenth-century scholar used history,
archaeology, and eloquence (along with a few well-placed fabrications) to promote his
own city, and – not quite incidentally – to save what seemed to be his own ruined career.
The strange career of Annius of Viterbo had a great deal to do with the peculiar
qualities of his native city. Even today, Viterbo is a mysterious place, with plentiful,
tantalizing evidence of its earlier history. Perched on the side of an extinct volcano, shaded
by pines and hazel trees, watered by artesian springs, the city’s steep, isolated buttes have
hosted human communities ever since prehistoric times (Fig. 61.2). Despite centuries,
if not millennia, of leveling and fi lling, Etruscan streets still wind their way around
the hills that make up the city, and many of these roadways are still lined with rock-
cut chamber tombs (Fig. 61.3). Modern builders have continued, like their Etruscan,
Roman, medieval and Renaissance forebears, to use local volcanic stone for construction:
the dark brown tufa was easy to cut in the quarry but hardened on exposure to air to
become a tough, durable material. Statues, pottery, and metal artifacts emerged from
tombs and sometimes from collapsed buildings – and still do. Already in the Middle
Ages, these trophies of antiquity were taken home or displayed in Viterbo’s churches as
precious relics. Some of the local Christian ceremonies also bear a strong resemblance to
ancient Etruscan rites, like the miracle of St. Mary the Liberator who calmed a violent,
demon-fi lled thunderstorm on the day of Pentecost in 1320, a Christian version of the
Etruscan thunder-diviners who used to foretell the future by interpreting the region’s
frequent electrical storms (in fact, Italy is the most thunder-prone country in the world).
All these curiosities must have tempted the curiosity of the young boy known as
Giovanni Nanni (the story of how Giovanni Nanni became “Annius” will be told below).
Born in Viterbo in 1437, he entered the Dominican convent of Santa Maria in Gradi, just
outside the city walls, in 1448, thus becoming a member of the fi fteenth century’s most
actively intellectual religious order.^1 The young man’s religious education would have
Figure 61.1 Anonymous seventeenth-century painter, Annius of Viterbo. Museo Civico, Viterbo.
Photograph: author.