Fumone

The village stands on a cone-shaped hill you can see from far off, alone between the valley of the Sacco and the basin of Fiuggi, in the middle of the three Hernician towns. That is exactly why it exists: in the centuries of Saracen and Norman raids, the most exposed places sent up smoke signals, and Fumone gathered them and passed them on to Rome. From that comes the name, and from that comes the saying: when Fumone smokes, the whole Campagna trembles. In 1186 the castle held out against a siege by Henry VI. And in 1295 the pope who had renounced the papacy, Celestine V, was shut up in it: he died here on 19 May 1296, murdered, according to some, at the will of Boniface VIII, who had succeeded him.

The papal government knew what this hill was worth: from the middle of the twelve hundreds it kept the castle under its own direct control, and Fumone had to wait for the fifteen hundreds to become a comune of its own. At the end of that century the castle passed to the marquises Longhi, who own it to this day. In the collegiate church there is a silver statue of San Sebastiano of 1697, a baptismal font of the twelfth century, and on the vault a fresco showing Celestine V held up by two friars. And in the little church of San Michele — built by a man from here who was an apostolic writer for the pope at Avignon — there was a bell cast in 1333 at the expense of one Giovanni di Svezia, John of Sweden, who lived in Fumone.