This village belonged to an abbey for a thousand years. The name comes from the Latin civitatula, little city, and it is likely that the place is one of those to which the people of the Capenate towns moved, perhaps from Capena itself after it was abandoned between the fourth and the fifth century. But the document that attests it is a bull of pope Gregory VII of 1081, where it appears as Civitas de Colonis — and that «de Colonis» says it was a colony, that is a settlement founded directly by the Papal State. In the same bull the village is a dependency of the monastery of San Paolo fuori le Mura, to which Gregory VII was giving enormous power: the faculty of being freed from civil and ecclesiastical authority, saving only the pope's, and jurisdiction over a vast territory lying between the right bank of the Tiber, the via Cassia and Monte Soratte. In the Middle Ages Civitella also had a river landing of its own, called Barcana, after a boat maintained at the expense of the community of the Tiber valley.
How many people lived there is known through salt: in 1416 the village appears in the list of communities subject to the salt tax and the hearth tax, with a consumption of ten rubbi, corresponding to an estimated population of eight hundred and fifty. The fief slipped out of the monks' hands and back into them more than once — it passed to the Colonna, then to two creditors of the pope from Narni for five thousand florins — until on the eighteenth of March of 1452 the monks of San Paolo bought it back for two thousand ducats. Between 1802 and 1803 the community, which numbered six hundred and was already afflicted by famine, was struck by an epidemic of malignant fever: a hundred and twenty people died, and two doctors. In official documents between the sixteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds the village used a round dry stamp with its patron Saint James the Greater holding the pilgrim's staff and hat, and the inscription Civitelle S.P. Castrum. The bond with the abbey ended only recently: after a possession of a thousand years, in 1996 the abbey of San Paolo made the castle over to the Comune.
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📅 Every year, on 25 July
On 25 July Civitella San Paolo, a municipality of 1,754 inhabitants in the province of Rome, celebrates its patron Saint James the Apostle; the town's typical feast is the Festa dei Canestri, on 1 May.
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 Civitella San Paolo, but an easy day trip away.
