Supino

The name states the slope: it comes from the Latin supinus, which of places means tilted, set on an incline. Local tradition, on the other hand, had Supino founded by refugees from Ecetra, the mythical Volscian city; but it was professor Cesare Bianchi of Ferentino, who had been headmaster of Supino's own middle school, who showed that Ecetra could not have stood in this territory. In Roman times, besides, the settlement lay lower down: in 1963 a villa was found there with a bath suite and black-and-white mosaic floors of marine subjects, among them Neptune's chariot. Only in the Middle Ages did the houses climb the hill.

From the hill, then, the stories came down. In 1125 the castle held out through a siege two years long by the troops of pope Honorius II. In 1303 a nobleman from here, Rinaldo da Supino, was among the men who went to Anagni with Guillaume de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna for the outrage against Boniface VIII. And the parish church of San Pietro Apostolo, rebuilt for the third time between 1750 and 1790, is a rarity for Lazio: a polygonal building with twelve faces, closer to Guarini's San Lorenzo in Turin than to anything in the neighbourhood. Inside, the statue of San Cataldo is a copy of 1870 — the first had been destroyed by fire — carved by an unknown Roman artist to a design by Ernesto Biondi of Morolo, who was fifteen years old at the time. The bronze door, seven asymmetrical panels, is of 1978, by Saverio Ungheri.