Norchia is an Etruscan archaeological site in the Viterbo area famed for a necropolis which extends from fosso Biedano to the top of a tuff rock hill. Its origins date to the mid Bronze Age but the city’s moment of maximum splendour was during the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.E. It was later occupied by the Romans and then became a medieval centre as the Castle dei di Vico and the churches of St. Peter and St. John attest. The external decoration of the Church of St. Peter, which dates to the 9th century C.E., preserves a decoration of multiple orders of half-columns; the building, with three naves, once had a crypt with columns supporting cross vaults that no longer exist.
The tombs in the necropolis are almost all “cubes” or “half cubes”. The most significant examples on the right shore of the Acqualta river include the temple (or Doric) tombs dating to the end of the 4th/early 3rd century B.C.E.; the Ciarlanti, Smurinas, Prostila and Caronte tombs in the fosso di Pile necropolis and the Lattanzi tomb at the Biedano necropolis. These funerary monuments have tympanums decorated with battle scenes and reliefs of a funeral procession. Also still visible are the remains of an entrance door and the track of via Clodia which links to the cava buia a trail cut out of the rock, about 400m long and 2.5m wide, which has Latin inscriptions and more recent religious symbols and crosses on the steep tuff walls.
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