Torri in Sabina

In a hamlet of this village, at Vescovio, stood for more than a thousand years the cathedral of the Sabines. The church of Santa Maria della Lode was built in the first decades of the ninth century over the Roman municipium of Forum Novum, of which Pliny, Virgil and Frontinus wrote and whose stones ended up in the bell tower; the place was a bishop's seat from four hundred and sixty-five, and remained ecclesia cathedralis Sabinorum until 1733, when the see was definitively moved to Magliano Sabina. Inside, the frescoes of the twelfth century are preserved: along the side walls the stories of the Old and the New Testament, and on the counter-façade a Last Judgement. The Roman municipium, for its part, had stopped working already in the third century after Christ.

The two hamlets of Rocchette and Rocchettine stand on two spurs of rock at the foot of monte Cosce, two hundred metres from one another; both were fortified settlements of the Savelli, first named in the fourteenth century. Today Rocchette is a living village, while Rocchettine has been abandoned since the early fifties: its church of San Lorenzo, recently restored, opens only on 10 August, the saint's day. In the gorge that divides the two rocks the Aia torrent makes its little waterfalls. As for Torri, it appears in 747 in the register of Farfa, as a casalis Turris given to the abbey; a castle is attested in 1298, and from 1368 the village belonged to the Orsini, who held it until 1728. During the German retreat, in the second world war, the old centre was mined and blown up: Torri is one of the three villages of the Sabina that the Germans mined.