Moricone

Which ancient city lies beneath, here, nobody knows, and there are four hypotheses in the field. Some have proposed ancient Orvinium, and Nibby with others rejected it decisively; some point to Regillum, one of the old Sabine cities of archaic Latium and the homeland of the gens Claudia, whose remains recent studies place at Colle Arioni; some, like Silvestrelli, lean on an old Farfa chronicle that speaks of a city built by an abbot who died at the beginning of the twelfth century; and finally there is the village's own agrarian university, which, reading Livy, proposes Antemnae, one of the thirty colonies founded by the Latins in Sabine territory. The first certain citation, by contrast, is of 1272: an act kept in the archive of Santo Spirito in Sassia speaks of a castle built on Monte Morrecone by the De Palumba, the counts of Palombara. The village's name comes from that very mountain, and the castle is still up there, on the highest point.

In 1611 the fief was bought by prince Marcantonio Borghese for a hundred thousand scudi plus half the castle of Pietraforte, and the village changed its face: the prince brought water from the springs of Casoli with an aqueduct of which well-kept stretches remain, among them the imposing Ponte del Diavolo over the Casoli stream; he built two grain mills and two oil mills; he drained land and opened a new gate in the old wall. Then he granted the use of the castle to sister Colomba Serantoni, who founded inside it the order of the Oblates of Saint Clare and opened a boarding school for girls, and who also wanted the new parish church, because the old one no longer sufficed for a village that had grown. The coat of arms, recognised in 1954, shows a three-peaked mountain with a dove and an olive branch on the middle peak. And on the eighth of September, in the procession of the Madonna del Passo, the people of Moricone prepare decorations made from local leaves — they call them filastrocche — and throw them onto the statue.