Canale is the new village of a dead one. Monterano, up on the hill, is today a ghost town: at the end of the eighteenth century French troops set it on fire, and the depopulation already under way was completed. Among its ruins stand the church of San Bonaventura and a fountain with a lion, both designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Canale had been born in the middle of the sixteenth century, at the foot of Monte Sassano, out of the huts of labourers and woodcutters brought from Tuscany and Umbria to clear the thick woods; it was called Canale di Magliano, and it grew as Monterano emptied.
The new village inherited the old one's things. The parish church, built in the eighteenth century, took the dedication of one of Monterano's churches, Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo, and its single nave recalls Bernini's San Bonaventura up there; inside are the marble stoups and the great wooden statue of the Madonna dei Sette Dolori, both carried down from Monterano. In 1873 a royal decree united Canale and Montevirginio under the name Canale Monterano. On Monte Sassano the Orsini built a hermitage in the early seventeenth century: twelve cells of strict enclosure, each linked by a spiral staircase to its own little garden below.
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📅 Every year, on 24 August, with the Palio delle Contrade at the end of the month
Canale Monterano celebrates Saint Bartholomew the Apostle and Saint Calepodia on 24 August, with the Corsa del Bigonzo, or Palio delle Contrade, at the end of the month.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Canale Monterano, but an easy day trip away.
