Gavignano

Gavignano stands on a small promontory where two rivers meet, in the Lepini mountains. The name is in all probability that of Aulus Gabinius, a Roman senator who is said to have been the first to set his dwelling on this hill, which from him took the name Gabinianum. The first official document that names the village is a papal bull of the tenth of July 1161, confirming that the castrum, with all its goods, belongs to the abbey of the Tre Fontane. A year before that document, in 1160, a boy of the Conti family was born here who would become pope with the name of Innocent III. The village had by then taken the shape of a castrum, and it still shows it: the walls on a trapezoidal plan, made of the houses themselves, two gates of different kinds — the Neapolitan one standing on its own, the Roman one built into the houses — and at the highest point the four-square keep, with its entrance on the north side. Later, around the keep, the baronial palace was built.

Gavignano has been sacked more than once. The worst came in 1495, during the clash between Charles VIII and the Papal State: the Conti of Gavignano stood with the pope, and the troops from beyond the Alps put the country to fire and sword, destroying the village entirely, along with those of Montelanico and Gorga; the castle was later rebuilt by a cardinal of the family. In 1557 the Colonna, allies of the Spanish against the pope, attacked the Conti castles: Gavignano's was the first to fall, and the village was sacked and destroyed again. In 1597 the fief passed to the Aldobrandini, and in 1608 cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini issued the Bandi generali: with those documents he granted the community the power to administer itself. For the first time, still under a lord, the common interest was entrusted to the community's own representatives. The seventeen hundreds were a good century — public works, a new church with organ and pulpit, a new clock on the bell tower — and at the end of it a Jacobin faction formed even here, gathered around the village doctor.