Poggio Moiano

On the origins of this Sabine village the notices are fragmentary, and the most accepted hypothesis is that it began as a settlement of woodcutters who arrived here between the seventh century and the year one thousand. It appears in documents for the first time in 1083, and the following year Henry the Fourth confirmed it as a fief; later a bull of pope Urban the Fourth calls it a castrum and attributes it to the abbey of Farfa. In the fifteenth century a Savelli took possession of it, and the family held it until 1462, when pope Pius the Second confiscated the possessions of Giacomo Savelli because he had sided with the Angevins in the war against the Aragonese for the kingdom of Naples. Then the village passed to the Orsini, went back to the Savelli, went to the Borghese and finally to the Torlonia: the usual chain, with one difference only, which is that here the reason for the first confiscation is written out in full.

The oddest thing, though, concerns the address. On leaving the Papal State in 1861, Poggio Moiano did not end up in a Latian province but was aggregated to the province of Umbria of the newborn Kingdom of Italy, and stayed there until 1927, when it was placed in the newly created province of Rieti: a village of the lower Sabina was Umbrian for sixty-six years without moving a stone. What did move, instead, is the music: in April 1973 don Antonio Santini started a music course and charged maestro Vittorio Lopa with putting together a folk group, which made its debut the following year and in the nineteen-eighties, directed by maestro Giuseppe Li Puma, reached its greatest popularity; it still plays at every feast, religious and civil, and bears the name of the priest who wanted it. The village stands at five hundred and twenty metres on the northern spurs of the Monti Lucretili, inside the regional park, and its workshops have always worked ceramics and terracotta.