Monte Compatri

The town stands at 576 metres on one of the secondary scoria cones of the Lazio volcano: the hill it spreads over was formed during the long activity of the Alban Hills, a complex that is still active but has been quiescent for thirty-six thousand years. Within the same comune the land runs from the 778 metres of Monte Salomone to the fifty-eight of the hamlet of Pantano Borghese, and with the altitude the climate changes too: above, a pre-Apennine setting that is rainy, windy and snowy; below, a continental one with strong thermal inversions — up to twenty-five degrees of range in a single day — drought and practically no snow. The hill has been identified by Tomassetti and other modern historians with ancient Labicum, a colony of Alba Longa, while in the seventeen-hundreds the historian Francesco Antonio Vitale placed Labicum on Monte Salomone, still within this territory.

After the counts of Tusculum and the Annibaldi came the Colonna, for about two centuries, then the Altemps, who in the fifteen-hundreds sold the fief to the Borghese: Scipione Borghese rebuilt the baronial palace, today the town hall, and turned the tower of the old medieval palace into the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Assunta, built between 1630 and 1633, whose façade is attributed to Carlo Rainaldi. In the town there is a fountain with a winged genius in the act of setting fire to a fuse, dedicated to the workers who died during the works to bring water to Monte Compatri; and a plaque remembers the civilian victims of the bombings of 25 and 30 January 1944. Here, on 11 November 1858, Alessandro Moreschi was born: father Nazareno Rosati, a retired member of the Sistine Chapel choir who went looking for new talent, heard him singing in the churches of the village and became his first music teacher. Moreschi was the last castrato singer to serve in the Sistine Chapel, and the only one to have recorded his own voice. Every fifteenth of August the five borghi of the town challenge one another with bow and arrow at a target twenty-five metres away: the archers who miss end up in a barrel full of water.