Trevi nel Lazio

For two thousand years this village has had to explain which Trevi it is. The area belonged to the Aequi, and after the Roman conquest the settlement became a municipium under the name Treba and then Treba Augusta — the addition served to distinguish it from Trebiae, that is from the Umbrian Trevi. Nineteen centuries later the problem was still there: in 1872 the town council resolved on the name Trevi nel Lazio. A good deal of the Roman town remains: the squared-block walls of the acropolis, the votive deposits of a sanctuary outside them, and the ionic-italic capitals of a temple, one of which stands today in the church of Santa Maria Assunta, reused as a baptismal font. The aqueduct of the Acqua Marcia rose in its territory. And on the boundary with Guarcino stands the arch of Trevi, a barrier of squared blocks with a wide arched opening, of the third or second century before Christ, which was probably a controlled passage between the territory of the Aequi and that of the Hernici.

In the Middle Ages the castle changed hands continually, and once it was itself the goods in a trade: in 1151 pope Eugene III handed it to the brothers Oddone and Carsidonio de Columna, who gave him in exchange the half of Tusculum that was theirs, together with Monte Porzio and Montefortino. In 1302 it was bought by Pietro Caetani, brother of pope Boniface VIII, and the Caetani held it until 1471, when they were driven out by the local people. Trevi then went back to the monastery of Subiaco, under whose temporal jurisdiction it remained until 1753. The patron is Saint Peter the hermit, who died here: to him is dedicated the oratory built on the spot where he was thought to have breathed his last, with an eighteenth-century marble group showing his death, taking up the iconography of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. At his feast, at the end of August, the citizens of Rocca di Botte come on pilgrimage too, that being the village where the saint was born. In August of 2011 the government planned to merge Trevi with neighbouring Filettino to cut costs: the plan stopped when the mayor of Filettino announced that his village would become an independent principality.