Ripi

Ripi has 5,346 inhabitants along the via Casilina, which here is the ancient via Latina, between the spurs of the Ernici mountains and the Sacco valley. The town is Volscian in origin, was conquered by the Hernici and in 306 before Christ became a Roman colony; later it entered the temporal dominion of the pope under the diocese of Veroli, and the castle was granted in fief by the bishop for the first time in 1025. Then came the Caetani, a series of local lords who gave themselves a statute, and finally the Colonna, who held the place for four centuries.

What makes Ripi different from the rest, though, lies under the fields. In the countryside there were natural outcrops of bitumen and tar, and in 1868, at a place called Le Petroglie, one of the first oil concessions in the peninsula was granted here: the beginning of one of the oldest workings of hydrocarbons in Italy. The wells multiplied between the end of the nineteenth century and the twentieth, with a particularly intense phase in the years of autarky and after the Second World War, and for a time the field was not a marginal item in the national energy accounts. Since 2009 the village has had a museum that tells that story, made out of two abandoned buildings: an old slaughterhouse and an old washhouse.