Church of Saint Giovenale

In the early Middle Ages the rock of Orvieto was once more seen as an ideal natural bulwark and the new urban centre took shape around the year thousand. It reached its zenith in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and its unique urban layout is still to all extents what it was then.
The most representative public buildings - the Town Hall or Palazzo Comunale, the Palazzo del Popolo, the Duomo or Cathedral, and the Palazzo dei Sette rose side by side with the older churches such as San Giovenale, Sant'Andrea, - and the convents of San Domenico, San Francesco, Sant'Agostino and Santa Maria dei Servi, the complex of the Papal Palace - and the private palaces and tower houses of the aristocracy.
The medieval city-state, with Orvieto at the centre of an extensive territory, achieved its highest civic and political expression in the free commune: the Guilds and Trades developed, providing the population with a wealth of finely made objects, while life in the city continued on its busy way, through periods of peace and turmoil, with the passing of time marked by the strokes of the Clock of Maurizio, the first automaton of its kind to regulate the working hours.