Mazzano Romano

Mazzano appears as fundus Mazanus among the properties of the domusculta Capracorum, the papal farming estate founded at the end of the eighth century, and then on a fragmentary slab datable to about 904 which names the general Theophylact as its owner: that stone was once set in the floor of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and is now in a palace in Florence. In the middle of the tenth century a deed transfers the whole castle called Mazzano with the houses and its buildings and also with the estates and the farms, together with the serfs of both sexes: the wording says exactly what a castle was at the time. And from at least 1327 the church of San Nicola was the place where the assembly of the heads of household met.

The ruins of that church, in piazza dell'Antisà, belong to the rebuilding of 1562 carried out on designs by Vignola, who in those same years was working at Caprarola; unsafe, the church was deliberately brought down by the military engineers in 1940. As for the lords, in 1526 the abbot sold the castle to the Anguillara for twelve thousand gold ducats; in 1599 it passed to cardinal Lelio Biscia and then by inheritance to the Del Drago, who remained its owners until the land reform of the nineteen fifties.