Colonna

Here the family is named after the village, not the other way round. The place appears as Columna in a deed of emperor Henry III of 1047, when the Colonna family did not yet exist: it was in 1101 that Pietro, of the Counts of Tusculum, inherited the castle and called himself Petrus de Columna, founding the house. And the village in its turn is named after a column: the remains of those of ancient Labicum, and oral tradition holds that one stood in the middle of the built-up area until not long ago.

In 1298 Boniface VIII ordered Colonna and its castle destroyed, to punish the family for not recognising his authority; the fief returned to the Colonna under the next pope, and passed later to the Ludovisi and the Rospigliosi-Pallavicini, who held it until 1848. Today Colonna is the smallest comune of the Castelli Romani and the second smallest in Lazio, after Ventotene. For sixty years its skyline was marked by a water tank of the fifties that everyone called «il dindarolo», the money box: it was pulled down in 2017 because it did not meet earthquake standards.