Marino

Nobody knows where the name comes from. The old scholars traced it to Gaius Marius; others to a «Marianum», a place consecrated to Mary; others again to the marana, the ditch that runs down the hill, or to some very ancient lord of whom nothing but the name is left. The first time it appears, in a papal list of the fourth century, it is a «possessio Marinas»: a property, not a town. Under that town, however, lies something rare: the mithraeum found in the sixties near the station, frescoed in the second century and beautifully preserved, holds one of only three painted tauroctonies in Italy. And four and a half kilometres of the Via Appia, a World Heritage site, cross the comune.

The castle has seen things. Giacoma de Settesoli, lady of Marino, protected Francis of Assisi from his first journey to Rome, and is buried at Assisi: for that bond the two towns are twinned. In 1379, in the thick of the Western Schism, two mercenary armies — one the pope's, one the antipope's — fought here, and the lord of Marino was driven from his castle by his own son, who was on the other side. Then came the Colonna, and stayed four centuries: it was Marcantonio Colonna who commanded the papal galleys at Lepanto in 1571. That victory is still celebrated: since 1925, at the Sagra dell'Uva — the oldest in Italy — the fountains of Marino run with wine. The rest of the year the fraschette do it, with porchetta.