Monterotondo

The name is a hill: Campum Rotundum, then Mons Rotundus, the round rise easy to defend that the documents already record around the year one thousand. The inhabitants, however, call themselves eretini, and that is another story: for centuries it has been said that Monterotondo inherits the ancient Sabine city of Eretum, but the town does not stand where that one stood, and of Eretum not one identifiable ruin survives — the ancient historians placed it at the eighteenth mile of the via Salaria, where it crossed the Nomentana. The name of a ghost, then, worn with pride.

The hill belonged to the Orsini for five centuries — Clarice came from here, who married Lorenzo the Magnificent — until Alexander VI Borgia, to break their power, had cardinal Battista Orsini poisoned in prison and in 1503 ordered the walls pulled down. Then came the Barberini, the ducal palace that is now the town hall, and the duomo of Santa Maria Maddalena. From the local quarries came the travertine that Lombard and Ticinese quarrymen supplied to the Fabbrica di San Pietro: a piece of the basilica is from here. In 1867 Garibaldi entered the town by burning Porta Romana, today Porta Garibaldi, and five Giovagnoli brothers of Monterotondo followed him — he called them «the Cairoli of Lazio». The silver medal for military valour, instead, is for the resistance of the population in October 1943. Rome is half an hour by train; the Sabina of the olive groves begins here.