Affile

Affile moved from one hill to another and left its churches behind. The Roman centre lay to the east, where the church of San Pietro stands, already mentioned by Gregory the Great in the 6th century as the seat of a monastic community; the castrum appears for the first time in 1013, and in 1109 pope Paschal II took it and gave it to the abbot of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco. Then the settlement climbed the western hill, and the church of Santa Maria, cited from 1005, found itself outside the walls though it remained the parish of the bishop of Palestrina. The role passed at last to Santa Felicita, where the village's universitas met, which became the parish in 1673.

The oldest portrait of Affile is inside a fresco. In the church of San Pietro, on the windowless wall, a painted inscription dates to 1473 a series of scenes including the first miracle of Saint Benedict at Affile: and there, in the background, is the village as it then was. Below the hill lies a Roman cistern with a barrel vault and the circular opening through which the water was drawn, now sealed; above the cistern, in 999, Otto III founded a church and monastery dedicated to Michael, Benedict and Adalbert, which came to be called Sant'Angelo supra cisternam and had already vanished by the 16th century. The arms, in use for centuries, show a vine branch with black grapes and an asp coiled round the trunk.