Pastena

The name says the work: it would come from the Latin pastinare, to turn the soil over to make it fit for growing. The village has a circular plan and stands at 318 metres, on a saddle between Monte Cimate and Monte Solo, in the middle of the Ausoni; the territory is mountainous to the west and south, hilly in the centre where the village is, and flat to the east. The fortress was rebuilt in 1227 by the Roman family of the Del Drago, and it mattered because Pastena lay on the border between the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples. The museum of peasant life and of the olive occupies an old oil mill, and everything it holds turns on oil.

North of the village opens a karst cave that was once called San Cataldo, or del Pertuso. Baron Carlo Franchetti found it in 1926, and the year after it was already open to visitors. The excavations carried out between 2001 and 2008 by the University of Perugia and the archaeological superintendency of Lazio brought up burials and ritual offerings of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age; at the bottom of one of the little lakes in the active branch lay a bronze axe and a bronze dagger of the middle Bronze Age, around the 15th century before Christ: offerings of the kind made for important men of the community. The material is still being studied and only partly published.