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This beautiful 17th-century church has been reclaimed by the marshy karst plain.
It is easy to miss the remains of the flooded Chiesa di Santa Maria when driving through the village of Vittorino from Cittaducale towards Terme di Cotilia. But this sunken ruin is one of the most spectacular and unexpected sites in the Sabina region of central Italy. It was renovated and expanded at the beginning of the 17th century by the Bishop of Cittaducale, as evidenced by the Latin inscription still visible on the façade, and soon became one of the valley’s major religious sites. But the architects ignored (or underplayed) the risks of building such a fine church on an unstable karst landscape in a marshy wetland.
