Patron saint festival In 321 days
Saint Antoninus, patron of the land of the Abbey of Farfa
📅 Every year, on 2 September
Fara in Sabina celebrates Saint Antoninus on 2 September, in the church dedicated to him.
The name is Lombard: fara means family clan, and the settlement goes back to the end of the sixth century. The hill opposite, however, holds something far older. On Monte San Martino stood a large settlement of the final Bronze Age, ringed by at least three dry-stone walls, irregularly elliptical, following the contour lines: it is now identified with Mefula, a city of the Aborigines which Dionysius of Halicarnassus placed barely five kilometres from Suna, today's Toffia. Dionysius writes that Mefula had walls — the only such case he reports for that people — and the dry-stone walling on the mountain, rare for the period, seems to bear him out. Mefula disappears as early as the first Iron Age, perhaps because the Sabine centres of the plain were then being born: one of them, at Santa Maria in Arci, is Cures, which went on living into Roman times and has left the remains of baths, a small theatre and a necropolis.
Within the municipal territory stands the abbey of Farfa, founded between the sixth and seventh centuries and become one of the most important Benedictine monasteries of central Italy, of very great political and economic weight in the Carolingian age: traces of that period remain in the bell tower and in the walls. The castle of Fara is attested from 1006; from 1050 it was under the abbey's control and later under the Orsini; from 1400 it became the seat of the commendatory abbot of Farfa, and in 1678 cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of pope Urban the Eighth, founded there the monastery of the Clarisse Eremite, still a closed convent. In 1867 Garibaldi, beaten at Mentana, reached with his volunteers the station of Passo Corese and set off north from there; and from here too, on the bank of the Tiber, the Cairoli brothers left with a few boats on the expedition that ended tragically at Villa Glori. On 10 December 1920, in the hamlet of Canneto Sabino, during a demonstration of farm labourers asking for better working conditions, a group of carabinieri killed eleven of them at Colle San Lorenzo: it was the bloodiest episode of the biennio rosso.
The Fara in Sabina guide
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Fara in Sabina 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Fara in Sabina
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Fara in Sabina, but an easy day trip away.
Villa Pallavicino 📍 Salerano Canavese · 5.8 km The Second Empire villa gazing over the morainic amphitheatre of Ivrea from a hill above Salerano Canavese. Torre di Pramotton 📍 Donnas · 15 km A twelfth-century hexagonal tower at 540 metres, signalling to the Pont-Saint-Martin castle and the fort of Bard. Castello di Suzey 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 15 km A ruin above Ivéry: in 1351 the Vallaise held an Ivrea merchant prisoner here for ransom. Pont Saint-Martin 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 16 km Two thousand years of traffic on a single span: the boldest flat arch left from Roman times. Riserva naturale stagno di Holay 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 15 km A hectare and a half of wetland at 750 metres, with relict species rare in the Aosta Valley. castello di Pont-Saint-Martin 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 16 km The old castle, with its rare hexagonal keep, half an hour up through the vineyards above the town.