Civita di Bagnoregio is a charming medieval small town of red tiled stone masonry buildings and stone paved narrow streets, set in a dramatically fragile and unstable environment, 120 kilometers north of Rome.

The landscape where the settlement is located is a ravine valley, made up of two different rocks. The base layer is made of ancient clay rock, rich in marine fossils (in Pleistocene, this region was a sea) and particularly subject to erosion. On top of this, there is a layer of tuff rock and lava material (approximately between 590 and 130 thousand years ago there was an active volcano in the area) also affected by fast erosion due to water and wind. The combination of the two rocks created a landscape featuring a hollow valley with many small tuff plateaus and cliffs that offered secure and defensible places for historic settlements. Civita di Bagnoregio, thanks to its striking position, settled on a small plateau of friable rock standing out the valley, is the most famous of these historic towns. Today, the only way to reach it a small pedestrian bridge.

Since its construction, the town has faced severe threats from erosion, and the edges of the plateau where it sits are slowly but constantly collapsing. For this reason, in 2006, the town was placed on the World Monuments Fund's Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites. For this same reason, for centuries, people living in the region have tried to save the town from its crumbling fate, hindering the natural degradation of the cliff and controlling natural erosion, making the town a paradigm of the struggle of men aiming to survive in a hostile, though beautiful, environment.

An incredible amount of historical records of geological events (mainly landslides), topographical and historical maps and documents have been collected about Civita and its surrounding landscape, along with stabilisation interventions, scientific and technical studies. Those documents have contributed to developing the science of soil consolidation (landslide science) and the history of this discipline in Italy and on the global scale.

In World War II, the Nazis partially destroyed the bridge linking Civita to the neighbouring town of Bagnoregio, and the villagers started to leave. A new bridge was built in the 1960s, but people living in extreme poverty were ordered out by the Italian Council. In 1981, The Civita Institute, a nonprofit corporation was established in towns by academics, architects, and students, linked with the Italian Studies Program of the University of Washington's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, intended to support cultural exchange and studies on the design quality of the built environment. 

In the last decades, the town has experienced a tourist revival, also thanks to the famous Hayao Miyazaki’s movie ‘Castle in the Sky’ (1986) that was freely inspired by its location and architecture. Since 2010, the mayor of Bagnoregio has developed a cultural-led policy promoting arts events and cultural festivals, and in 2013 decided to limit the number of visitors and charge them to enter the village. Thanks to the toll, communal taxes were abolished in Civita and nearby Bagnoregio, making them the only towns without municipal taxes in Italy.