Poggio Catino

The name of Poggio Catino is a description of the place: a knoll above a basin. The basin is that natural hollow at the foot of Monte Tancia where, towards the end of the seventh century, some Lombard bands turned aside from their march and stopped, giving rise to the village of Catino. There, however, there was no room to build, and so people began to settle the nearby Moricone hill: the new village was already finished before 1093, the year in which the registers of the abbey of Farfa note the castrum and its size. The two villages are still two, nine hundred metres apart, and formally they became one only with the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. At Catino remain the Lombard tower with its fortified ruins and the church of Sant'Eustachio; at Poggio Catino, the church of San Rocco, of the fourteenth century, with the clock on its front and fifteenth-century frescoes in the apse.

Out of the smaller village came Gregory of Catino, monk and historian, who at Farfa gathered and copied out the papers of the abbey. Farfa, for that matter, held both castra and ruled the fortunes of the whole Sabina; then, in the thirteenth century, the two villages made themselves free comuni, and all through the Middle Ages the fief passed among the Counts of Sant'Eustachio, the Orsini, the Savelli, the Vitelli and the Capizucchi, who obtained from pope Clement VIII the title of marquis. In 1614 the Olgiati bought it, and held it until 1816: their palace, at Poggio Catino, is today the town hall. Near the cemetery can be seen the baths called of Sulla, of the republican period, which nobody, however, has ever been able to attribute to Sulla for certain.