- chapter 61: Annius of Viterbo –
friar knew that there were new educational philosophies afoot. In cities like Florence
and Rome, the movement we know as humanism had begun to encourage new fi elds of
endeavor, such as critical reading and comparison of ancient texts, a systematic study
of ancient art and architecture, and an emphasis on a style of writing and speaking that
drew its inspiration from the style of great classical orators like Cicero rather than the
exhaustive precision of Scholastic learning. The University of Rome had introduced a
humanist curriculum in the late 1460s (exactly when Nanni himself had begun teaching
Scholastic theology in Viterbo), including courses on rhetoric and the beginnings of what
would eventually be called archaeology.^9
Giovanni Nanni may not have had a humanistic education himself, but he understood
how the humanists worked, and began to use some of their methods himself. Like the
students at the University of Rome who had begun to explore the ruins of the Imperial
palace on the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, and the Golden House of Nero, he examined
Viterbo’s buildings, streets, hills and bridges for clues to the past. At the same time
he searched through the Dominican archive for early documents, and scoured the city’s
libraries to fi nd books, both old and new, about Viterbo and its place in world history to
add to the library of sources he had already amassed during his stay in Genoa.
Viterbo, as its citizens were well aware, had an important history of its own. For
several decades in the thirteenth century, from 1257 to 1282, the city had housed the
Pope and Curia, and had always served as an important base for military orders like the
Knights Templar (before their suppression) and the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of
Jerusalem and Rhodes – in fact, two decades after Giovanni Nanni’s death, Viterbo would
become the world headquarters for the Hospitallers of St. John, between their expulsion
from Rhodes in 1522 and their defi nitive resettlement on Malta in 1530.
Strictly speaking, the Viterbo that Magister Giovanni and his fellow citizens knew,
the bustling town with its scenic piazzas, impressive waterworks, and imposing city
walls, had only existed since the early thirteenth century. In 1210 the fi rst complete
circuit of walls was erected in volcanic stone to enclose a series of separate settlements,
each perched on its own distinct rocky outcrop, joining these scattered parishes (pievi)
into a single community. The name “Viterbo” was a few centuries older than the town
defi ned by that initial circuit wall: it fi rst appeared on documents from the eighth
century, but the eighth century was still well into the Middle Ages, an unimpressive
millennium and a half after the foundation of Rome.^10 Magister Giovanni was convinced,
however, that the center of Viterbo must have been settled as early as Rome itself; too
many ancient artifacts had emerged from the soil for him to believe that the city had
sprung up wholesale centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. But that ancient city
must have had another name.
Magister Giovanni’s surviving writings show that his revisionist view of history
developed gradually. He began by gathering together the information reported by ancient
Greek and Latin writers and local chroniclers, comparing these textual sources with local
names, recent archaeological discoveries, and the actual lay of the land, within the city
limits of Viterbo and in its surrounding territories. His fi rst concern, clearly, was to give
his native city a respectable ancient pedigree, the older the better. For a fi fteenth-century
scholar there was no civilization more ancient than Egypt, thousands of years earlier than
Greece, Etruria and Rome (more worryingly, the Egyptian king lists preserved in Greek
writers like Manetho extended back beyond the traditional date for Creation). Happily
for Viterbo, however, Magister Giovanni could report in 1491 that he had discovered