Boville Ernica

Boville Ernica has 8,811 inhabitants on a solitary hill at 487 metres, inside a medieval wall from which eighteen towers rise, alternately round and square, all still standing. Until 1908 the town was called Bauco, and the reason is disputed: the large holes and caves to the north of the territory, or else the elder trees that once covered the hill. At Monte di Fico there survive older megalithic walls and votive terracottas depicting the ox.

The settlement lay on the plain and climbed the hill after the raids of the Saracens and the Hungarians, drawn also by the fame of Pietro Ispano, the pilgrim who came from Spain and lived here in a grotto. In 1204 the people of Bauco drove back the troops of the kingdom of Naples, and pope Innocent III rewarded the town with administrative autonomy: a sort of republic was born, governed in turn by twelve families, which lasted more than four hundred years. The church of San Pietro Ispano keeps a mosaic by Giotto, the Angel, which once stood in the old Constantinian basilica of Saint Peter in Rome.