Forano

In 1889 a pastor named Luigi Angelini built a Waldensian church at Forano — a Protestant church in the middle of the Sabina, less than twenty years after the end of the Papal State — and in the bell tower of that church hangs a bell cast at Cincinnati, in Ohio, in 1893. It is the kind of detail that tells more about a village than a chronicle: this one, on the last western ridges of the Sabine hills, looking down over the Tiber valley, had by then people who had crossed the ocean and come back. Not far off, the parish church of the Santissima Trinità was built in the seventeenth century by Luigi Strozzi, whose family had held the castle since the century before; the church of San Pietro is known from 1049, and that of San Sebastiano was restored in 1529 but does not appear in the list of churches of 1343 — which is how a building is dated by its absence.

The village had been born as a Sabine settlement, and in the eighth century before Christ it took the name Forum Iani, because the Romans built a temple to the god Janus here. From the republican age to the time of Augustus the countryside filled with villas: in one of them, whose great cistern for rainwater still stands, a lead pipe was found with a name stamped upon it. But the neighbouring market town of Forum Novum, which stood by a watercourse and on the roads leading to the cities and the ports, grew in importance in the age of Augustus, and Forum Iani lost more and more of its own. In the eleventh century it was a fief of the Savelli, and at the beginning of the twelfth the castle belonged to the abbey of Farfa: in 1105 two Roman noblemen, the brothers Ottaviano and Oddone, occupied it and took it from the monastery. Outside the village stands a round mausoleum they call il Sassone, which in shape and size recalls that of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way.