Cantalupo in Sabina

The main gate of Cantalupo is called Porta Maggiore, but everybody knows it as the Clock Gate, and on top of it stand two white marble statues, full-length, originally a little over a metre high: Mercury on the left and Minerva on the right, which here they call the Bammocci and which seem to be of the fifteen hundreds. A legend tells that, after an earthquake, the inhabitants were asked to choose between repairing the damaged water reserves and making two statues: and they chose the statues. For this reason, jokingly, the people of Cantalupo are called bammocciari. The Minerva today has no head: it was stolen. The village's name too stands between legend and document: the story has it that a hungry wolf wandered by night howling until it saw a bright star in the sky, and from that moment its howl turned into harmonious song — and that is what is on the arms, a black wolf and a shining star. More realistically, the name comes from the union of two settlements, Chantia and Lugo, at the time the Castrum was being built. The «in Sabina» is recent: it was added by royal decree on the twenty-ninth of March of 1863.

The Castrum Cantalupi is first cited in the Farfa register in 1037. The fortress was made by the counts of Cuneo, the Palatium by the counts of Sant'Eustachio, then came the Savelli and after them the Cesi of Acquasparta and Rignano, who turned the castle into a residential palace. In 1862 baron Giovanni Battista Camuccini, son of the neoclassical painter Vincenzo, bought the patrimony of the former fief and turned the palace into a museum; inside it is kept the room where Giuseppe Garibaldi spent the night before the battle of Mentana. The administration has moved about a good deal too: on entering the Kingdom of Italy the comune was attached first to the province of Perugia, then to that of Rome, and only in 1927 did it end up in the new province of Rieti. In the parish church of Maria Santissima Assunta, in a chapel called the chapel of the Magi, a circular Roman funerary urn serves as the baptismal font. And the church of San Girolamo, of the late fourteen hundreds, was mined by the retreating Germans: the side walls were rebuilt in the fifties, the roof and the interior in 1968.