Orvieto (Italian: [orˈvjɛːto]) is a city and comune in the Province of Terni, southwestern Umbria, Italy, situated on the flat summit of a large butte of volcanic tuff.

Its wall paintings depict a funeral banquet, giving some insight into the real-life gatherings held after the deaths of aristocratic Etruscans.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire its defensible site gained new importance: the episcopal seat was transferred from Bolsena, and the city was held by Goths and by Lombards before its self-governing commune was established in the tenth century, in which consuls governed under a feudal oath of fealty to the bishop.

Orvieto, sitting on its impregnable rock controlling the road between Florence and Rome where it crossed the Chiana, was a large town: its population numbered about 30,000 at the end of the 13th century.

[6] Its municipal institutions already recognized in a papal bull of 1157,[7] from 1201 Orvieto governed itself through a podestà, who was as often as not the bishop, however, acting in concert with a military governor, the "captain of the people".

On 15 November 1290, Pope Nicholas IV laid the cornerstone for the present building and dedicated it to the Assumption of the Virgin, a feast for which the city had a long history of special devotion.

The design has often been attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, but the prevailing modern opinion is that the master mason was an obscure monk named Fra' Bevignate from Perugia.

In the following decade, cathedral authorities called Sienese architect and sculptor Lorenzo Maitani to stabilize the building and design a façade.

Pope Urban IV (1261–1264), a Frenchman who was crowned in the Dominican church in Viterbo and who spent most of his papacy in Orvieto, also left important legacies in the city.

Urban IV with the Bolla Transiturus established and promulgated in 1264 from Orvieto to the Christian universe the solemnity of Corpus Domini which the entire Catholic world celebrates.

Supporting pillars of the institution of the universal Christian Eucharistic solemnity were Saints Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, who together with Hugues de St-Cher were readers in the Studium Curiae of Orvieto.

An inscription on the well boasts that QUOD NATURA MUNIMENTO INVIDERAT INDUSTRIA ADIECIT ("what nature stinted for provision, application has supplied").

[8] The underground city boasts more than 1200 tunnels, galleries, wells, stairs, quarries, cellars, unexpected passageways, cisterns, superimposed rooms with numerous small square niches for pigeon roosts, detailing its creation over the centuries.

Its aim was to provide the church a secure site in the city and allow the cardinal and his captains to consolidate recent military victories.

To ensure that the city would be sufficiently supplied with water in the event of a siege, he gave orders for the digging of the now famous artesian well Pozzo di San Patrizio (1528–1537).

[citation needed] Alongside Saint Anselm College, Orvieto also hosts a study abroad program with the University of Arizona founded by archaeologist David Soren.