Poggio Nativo

In the fourteen hundreds the village, then held by the Savelli, did something that pope Pius the second thought worth putting into his Commentaries. Poggio Nativo had housed, on orders received, the troops of Piccinino, who were in the pay of the pope's enemies; so the papal army under Antonio Piccolomini came and laid siege to it. The castle surrendered. But when Piccolomini and his escort had passed through the entrance to the town, the gates were closed behind them and the party was captured. The rest of the papal army reacted, broke into the village and subjected it to sack and destruction. Twenty years later, in 1480, Poggio Nativo returned into the hands of the Savelli.

Most of the medieval documents call the place Podium de Donadei, and one explanation makes Donadeo a local landowner who founded it — although no document exists that allows him to be identified. The more accepted reading takes the name instead from the position, on a steep spur which made the village hard to reach and a safe refuge when the invasions came: podium donum Dei, the hill that is a gift of God. One way or the other, the name then wore down one step at a time — Podio Donadeo, Poggio Donadio, Poggio Nadio, Poggio Natio — until it arrived at Poggio Nativo, which no longer means anything. Of the castle little remains, because the earthquake of 1915 took it: two levels of walled-up fifteenth-century windows and a polygonal bastion in the middle of the village. In two small caves along the Fosso di Riana, potsherds of the Bronze Age were found together with human remains from a burial; but the same caves also gave up bones of deer, wild boar, roe deer, badger and wolf, and from that the archaeologists conclude that at least one of them also served as a hunting post. The railway planned again and again from the end of the nineteenth century never arrived; there is, instead, a Buddhist monastery.