San Vittorino, the sunken church

Few people know the ruined church of San Vittorino, near Cittaducale: a charming place thanks to the spring of water that flows inside, whose charm inspired a visionary film sequence of the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.The church of San Vittorino, is a ruined religious building and is also known as "the church submerged", "the church in the water" or "the church that sinks". The building of the church on the ruins of the ancient pagan temple is due to the fact that in 96 A.D. Saint Vittorino of Amiterno was martyred there. It seems that, already in the fourth century, in the place of the martyrdom of the saint rose a small crypt, which for a certain period housed the tomb of the saint; in the following century his body was stolen and transported to the church of San Michele Arcangelo, in Amiterno. The small crypt gave way to a real church only several centuries later, between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the church of San Vittorino was built. The present appearance of the church dates back to the extension works which, as an inscription still legible on the façade reports, began in 1608 and were completed in 1613. The intervention of remaking was wanted by the bishop of Cittaducale, Pietro Paolo Quintavalle. In the nineteenth century the ground on which it was built began to sink and an underground spring emerged from the floor and flooded the church, which therefore had to be abandoned. The sudden sinkhole was due to the shallowness of the water table in the ground where the church was founded (only 90 cm above ground level), and was probably triggered by the 1703 earthquake. In the 1980s, following the collapse of the roof, the province of Rieti carried out urgent work to slow the sinkhole and prevent further collapses. The intervention was to be followed by the complete recovery of the building, but it was never carried out. The church is still abandoned and continues to slowly sink.