Fonte Nuova

Fonte Nuova is one of the youngest towns in Lazio: it has existed only since the fifteenth of October 2001, when Tor Lupara and Santa Lucia broke away from Mentana and Guidonia Montecelio. Yet it stands on one of the oldest. Beneath the houses that spread from the nineteen-fifties along the Nomentana and the Palombarese lie the ruins of Nomentum, a town of the Latin League famous for its climate, which Ovid remembered for the wine made here; at Quarto Conca two rock-cut tombs date from somewhere between a hundred and thirty years before the founding of Rome, and are therefore older than the capital that would one day absorb them. It was in this countryside, in 799, that the pope rode out to meet Charles, king of the Franks, to settle what would be born the following year: the Holy Roman Empire.

The rest is told by the towers. The one on via della Torre, medieval and later a semaphore station, repainted and so known as the «Torre Tricolore», gave Tor Lupara its name; on Monte Gentile the tower of San Biagio is called the «Sedia del Diavolo», the devil's chair, for its shape; together with the farmstead of Tor Sant'Antonio they all defended the Orsini castle at Mentana. A more recent and far less expected distinction belongs to the Madonna delle Rose clinic, closed in the early nineteen-seventies: it became one of the most heavily used sets in Italian genre cinema, from crime thrillers to Profondo rosso and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi. Today the town is restoring the country drinking troughs abandoned when farming was mechanised, the hills give Sabina olive oil, and every spring the statue of Our Lady of Fatima arrives at Tor Lupara by helicopter.