Paliano has 8,146 inhabitants on a tuff hill between Rome and the Ciociaria. From the fifteenth century it belonged to the Colonna — first a duchy, then a principality — and it was one of their centres of power along with Palestrina and Genazzano, so much so that a branch of the family is still called the Paliano branch. Between 1554 and 1559 Marcantonio Colonna turned the old fortress into a modern one, with bastions for artillery, ditches, drawbridges and earthworks; returning victorious from Lepanto, he had some rooms frescoed with his triumphal entry into Rome.
In 1844 the Colonna gave the fortress to pope Gregory XVI, who turned it into a penal house; at the end of the nineteen-seventies it became a maximum-security prison, and concrete walls covered much of the original architecture. In 2017 pope Francis went there to wash the feet of twelve inmates. In the same town, of quite another kind, stands the municipal gymnasium: it was built in the seventies by a young Massimiliano Fuksas, and it is the work that first won him international attention.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 30 November; Ferragosto brings the Palio e Corteo Storico dell'Assunta
Paliano celebrates Saint Andrew the Apostle on 30 November, in the church dedicated to him. Every year, during the Ferragosto holiday, the Palio e Corteo Storico dell'Assunta is held.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Paliano, but an easy day trip away.
