Vico nel Lazio

The village stands on a limestone hill at seven hundred and twenty-one metres, in the Ernici mountains, and within its territory rises Monte Monna, one of the highest peaks of the range. The thing that counts here is the walls: they are of the eleventh century, built entirely of local stone, and they have stayed whole, ringing the whole settlement, with three gates. In one of them, the Porta a Monte, a stone is set into the masonry with two words cut on it: Nerva imperante, in the reign of Nerva. Which means there was a Roman circuit here already, and it was taken apart to raise the medieval one; of that older wall only an arch is left, towards Porta Guarcino.

How Vico began nobody knows: from some documents of the year one thousand it is clear the castle was already there. The palace of the governor was the house first of the Colonna and then of the Tolomei, to whom the Colonna made over Vico along with other villages of the Ernici in the fifteen hundreds. On the last Sunday of July the half-length statue of the patron, Saint George the martyr, comes out of the collegiate church of San Michele Arcangelo, which is of 1200, and is carried through the streets of the borgo with the confraternities, the associations, the councils of the villages round about and a delegation from Michalowice, the Polish village twinned with Vico. The trade here is wood: they make furniture in the old styles. And the Touring Club has given the village its orange flag.