Castelnuovo di Porto

Castelnuovo di Porto has 8,059 inhabitants on a tufa spur north of Rome, inside the park of Veii. It appears for the first time in 1074, in a bull of Gregory VII, under the name of Castrum Novum: it was half a fief of the abbey of San Paolo fuori le mura. From then on its history is that of a castle the popes take away from the Colonna and give back: it comes to them in 1252, Boniface VIII seizes it from them, Clement V returns it, and in 1501 Alexander VI Borgia confiscates it, arms it — and then gives it back to the Colonna once again.

At the top of the borgo stands the Rocca Colonna, which from a fortress became a Renaissance palace, standing apart on the highest point. On an outside wall a plaque records that in 1580 it was Clarice Colonna Anguillara who had that stretch of the via Flaminia restored; another records that Charles III of Bourbon stopped here on his way to take the Kingdom of Naples. Not far off, on the plateau of Belmonte, are the remains of two fortified settlements one on top of the other: the older is Etruscan, and was probably a colony of Veii.