Formello

About seventy per cent of the municipal territory lies inside the regional park of Veii, and Veii itself — the Etruscan city that once rivalled Rome — stood here. From the Etruscan centuries there remain tombs, artefacts and above all the so-called Formello alphabet, an archaic Etruscan abecedary. After the Roman conquest of Veii, in 396 before Christ, the area emptied, and it took until 780 for pope Adrian the First to found here the domusculta Capracorum, a great farming estate created also to counter the expansion of the Lombard abbey of Farfa. The Saracen raids of the ninth century brought it down; but among its holdings was one called fundus Formellum, where a settlement had grown that inherited from Capracorum the role of centre of the district. From the eleventh century the village belonged to the monastery of San Paolo fuori le Mura and was probably fortified, but it grew more slowly than other places of the same origin, most likely because it lay far from the via Cassia, beyond the river Cremera.

In 1279 Formello was granted in fief to the Orsini, who gave it a tower and a moat; in 1544 the community obtained a statute regulating its relations with the feudal lords. In 1661 the Orsini, weighed down by debt, sold the fief to cardinal Flavio Chigi, and under the Chigi the village was renewed: from 1665, directed by Felice della Greca, the villa Chigi-Versaglia rose on earlier farm buildings. The church of San Lorenzo, which had inherited the functions of the destroyed church of Capracorum and is first mentioned in 1033, was enlarged in 1574 with the side aisles and holds the frescoes attributed to Donato Palmieri; its high altar of coloured marbles, first destined for the church of Sant'Apollinare in Rome, was placed here in 1744. In 1795 a meridian line was built in it, the same as the one in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome but exactly one third of its size: destroyed in 1958 when the floor was redone, it was rebuilt in 2008.