Montorio Romano

The name comes from the Latin Mons Aureus, golden mount, and it was already in use in the ninth century: it is traced to the yellow-gold colour of the tuff, which in certain parts of the territory — at le Pantane, for instance — comes out after the ploughing. There are other guesses and no certainty. To tell it apart from other places of the same name it was also called Montorio de Romania, Montorio di Romagna and the like; since the sixteen hundreds it has been Montorio Romano. The first certain notice is of that same ninth century, when the place appears as a possession of an abbot and of the monastery of Farfa; from the eleventh century onwards it is no longer a small tilled village but a castrum on its knoll, gathered and fortified, and the castle built then is the one you can still see. The oldest people of the village tell that Montorio was built by exiles.

In the fourteenth century the village appears in the list of the salt monopoly it had to buy from Rome: fifteen rubbi. The Roman nobles, once they had discovered the place existed, immediately grabbed its mill — the mola — because a mill was money; and it was a dangerous property, because it was often attacked by criminals or by hungry people. In 1480 Montorio is described in a document as a village that yields little, compared with the neighbouring Palombara Sabina and Moricone. Among its lords were the Savelli, the Orsini and the Barberini. And in 1869 David Lazzaretti, the Tuscan peasant who founded the popular church called giurisdavidica, came to withdraw into the eremitic life in the old hermitage of Sant'Angelo, here. The church of the patron saint keeps frescoes painted around the middle of the fifteen hundreds by Lorenzo Torresani, and the territory falls inside the area of the Sabina olive oil.