Piglio

The name appears as Castrum Pileum in a document of 1088, and legend derives it from the pileum, the Roman helmet that a gust of wind is said to have carried off the head of Quintus Fabius Maximus the Delayer as he passed this way. The comune believed it enough to put on its arms an eagle standing on a Roman helmet, with olive branches, two axes and bunches of grapes. The ancients may have known the place as the Capitulum of the Hernici, which Strabo puts between Olevano and Anagni; out in the fields there are the remains of Roman villas, and one of them is still called the villa of Maecenas.

Above the town stands the castle of the Colonna, begun probably in the early eleventh century: an upper part on the levelled summit, with the keep, the cistern and the parade ground, and a lower part twenty-five metres below; from up there the road climbing to the Arcinazzo plateaux was controlled, and not far off is the Torre del Piano, of 1080, some thirty metres high. In 1347 Piglio was taken by Cola di Rienzo; from the end of the fourteenth century until 1816 it belonged to the Colonna. In 1656 plague decimated the population, and tradition gives the image of the Madonna delle Rose the credit for stopping it: from May to October her statue stays in the collegiate church, and on 30 October, the anniversary of the deliverance from the contagion, it goes back in procession to its sanctuary. In 1944 Allied bombing destroyed about a third of the buildings, the collegiate church among them: it was rebuilt in its old baroque forms, and on one flank it keeps the ogive of an ancient doorway.