Civita di Bagnoregio

Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.

Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.

Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.

Civita di Bagnoregio is a hilltop village in the province of Viterbo, in the Lazio region of central Italy, about 120 kilometres north of Rome. It sits on a cap of volcanic tuff in the Valle dei Calanchi, the badlands valley east of Lake Bolsena.

It is called la città che muore, the town that is dying, because it stands on soft marine clay beneath a hard tuff cap. The clay erodes, the cap collapses in slabs, and the village slowly loses ground. The writer Bonaventura Tecchi coined the name.

On foot. No road reaches the village. Visitors park in Bagnoregio and cross a pedestrian footbridge about 300 metres long, built in 1965. The walk up takes around twenty minutes and climbs to the Porta Santa Maria gate.

Yes. In 2013 Civita became the first town in Italy to charge admission, to help fund work shoring up the eroding rock. The ticket is currently about €5, with a higher price on Sundays and public holidays.

About eleven people live there permanently, as of 2021. The number rises in summer, when day-visitors fill the lanes, and falls again in winter. The village drew an estimated 850,000 visitors in 2017.

Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan theologian who died in 1274, was born in the Bagnoregio area around 1221. Tradition places his birthplace in Civita itself; the house is said to have fallen into the ravine as the cliff eroded.

Spring and autumn are mild and less crowded than high summer. Many visitors come for late afternoon, when the light turns the tuff and the surrounding calanchi gold, and the day-trippers have started back across the bridge.

It has been a meaningful gift for travelers who made the walk across the bridge. Civita stays with people, partly because it is slowly disappearing. A Keepsake or a Small with a handwritten note from the studio carries the place well.

The stained-glass blues and amber-gold of the tuff sit well in warm Mediterranean rooms, in Old-World and Tuscan-leaning interiors, and against plaster or lime-washed walls. It also holds its own as a single jewel-tone accent in a quieter, minimalist space.

Yes. The palette leans into the terracotta-and-ochre direction running through current Mediterranean-modern and warm-minimalist rooms. The deep, glass-like blues keep it from reading flat, so it works as the warm anchor on an otherwise neutral wall.

Above a console or a reading chair, a single Large holds the wall on its own. Above a sofa or a bed, most rooms want the presence of a four-tile Mural, and a nine-tile Mural anchors a tall or wide wall.

Yes. For a bathroom, a kitchen backsplash, or any spot with steam and splashes, choose the Dura Satin or Matte finish. Both are scratch-resistant and made for vertical, damp installations; the glossy finish is better kept to drier walls.

A soft microfibre cloth and water are all it needs. The colour is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, beneath a thin glossy finish, so there is no print on top to wear away. Skip abrasive cleaners.

Yes. Every WenderVista piece is created in-house by Wender Studios in Knoxville, Tennessee, and hand-finished there. The artwork is original to the studio, not licensed stock, and the place is part of our growing atlas of vistas.