Morolo

In September 1303 one Tommaso da Morolo took part, with an armed company, in the assault on Anagni led by Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret to seize pope Boniface the Eighth. The following year the village's name ended up in a bull of excommunication, the Flagitiosum scelus of Benedict the Eleventh, published at Perugia on the thirteenth of June. Before that Morolo appears as oppidum Murolum in a bull of Urban the Second of August 1088; and in 1216 the count of Ceccano assaulted and destroyed its fortress in a night attack in which, according to a local chronicle, four hundred and twenty-four men and women died, that is all those who could not escape.

The population of this village is also known, worked out from a loan of grain. In 1614 the Colonna prince granted the municipality forty-two rubbia and a half quarta of wheat, about seventy-eight quintals, to be returned at the next harvest; the grain was distributed to families at half a quarta each, some thirty kilos. From that distribution historians have worked back to the number of households, about two hundred and sixty, and so to a population of roughly one thousand six hundred: a census reconstructed from a loan. Another document, of 1674, fixes what Morolo owed Ferentino for grazing on Monte Rave: one scudo for each ox. The Colonna gave up their last rights, and the ruins of the fortress, only in 1908.