Below Colli, at Paduli, there was a village built on the lake shore: lived in from the middle Bronze Age to the early Iron Age, it got by on crops, livestock and fishing, and ended burnt in a fire in the ninth century before Christ. Archaeologists have identified it with Marruvium, the protohistoric town that Dionysius of Halicarnassus placed halfway between the island in the lake and Terni, and that had been looked for over centuries. A little further on, at the Grotte di San Nicola, stand the remains of the villa of Quintus Axius: Cicero lodged here in 54 BC, come to argue the quarrel between the people of Rieti and those of Terni over the floods of the Nera, which the latter blamed on the channel the Romans had dug. Cicero found for Rieti.
The present village, by contrast, is young: it was called Colli di Labro and broke away from the municipality of Labro only in 1957, after disputes between the two populations so bitter that the police were sometimes needed. Not even the name of Labro was left: in 1962 the village took that of the river and became Colli sul Velino. In its territory lies Lake Ventina, the last piece of water of the ancient Lake Velino: no more than three and a half metres deep, and smaller every year.
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📅 Every year, on 22 July
On 22 July Colli sul Velino, a municipality of 524 inhabitants in the province of Rieti, celebrates its patroness Saint Mary Magdalene (santa Maria Maddalena).
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Colli sul Velino, but an easy day trip away.
