On 6 February 1971 the small town of Tuscania, twenty miles west of Viterbo and the same distance north-east of Tarquinia, was the scene of a local but very violent earthquake, which killed a number of people and rendered much of the old town totally uninhabitable.

Tuscania (until 1911 Toscanella) is best known to most visitors to Italy for its two magnificent medieval churches, that of San Pietro on the ancient acropolis and that of Santa Maria Maggiore, both of them fine romanesque buildings on the site of earlier churches. San Pietro has been thought by some writers to incorporate parts of the earlier structure, and both churches contain a number of earlier fittings. The town itself is less familiar, although it is still enclosed within the circuit of its medieval walls, and inside these walls it has retained a large number of medieval and later buildings in a setting largely unspoilt by modern development. Almost all the growth of the last forty years has taken place northwards and westwards, outside the medieval walls, so that the visitor still has very much the impression of the old walled city, dominated in the foreground by the hill of San Pietro itself, with its picturesque group of towers and other buildings, and spreading up the ridge beyond it the compact mass of the old town.