Mompeo

The name comes from a famous owner: the fundus Pompeianus, the estate of Gnaeus Pompey, who had a villa in the Palombara district. Of the country houses that wealthy Romans built on these hills, what mostly survives is the plumbing — cisterns, aqueducts, bath rooms — because that was the part they cared about most. The village as such appears in 817 in the Farfa register, as a holding of the abbey; in 875 abbot John granted the fief to one Francone, who built himself the fortress on the hill where the old town stands today.

From the twelfth century onwards Mompeo belonged to the Orsini for five hundred years, then it became a marquisate, sold to the Capponi of Florence and by them, in 1646, to the Naro of Rome. It was the Naro who changed its face: in place of the fortress, of which they saved two towers, they raised a baronial palace with gardens and fountains, gave it a travertine gateway and paved the village streets so that they all led there. Fabrizio and Bernardino Naro, friends of Pope Urban VIII, grew so attached to the place that they had their hearts buried in the chapel of the parish church of Mompeo, keeping their bodies in Rome.