Nazzano

There is a painter who bears the name of this village, and nobody knows what he was really called. The Painter of Nazzano takes his name from the tomb the archaeologists found in the necropolis of Colle Carafa: he was an artist of the Tiber valley, close to the Faliscan-Capenate culture, and he worked in the fourth century before Christ. His red-figure kraters, come out of the necropoleis of Nazzano, of Nepi and of the valley, were carried off between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and are now to be seen at Villa Giulia, at the Louvre and at the British Museum: on one there is Athena with Poseidon, on another a divinity attended by a Nike. In the village, meanwhile, stands the church of Sant'Antimo, built in the tenth century on the remains of a temple to the god Silvanus, keeping in its apse frescoes attributed to Antoniazzo Romano.

The other thing that has made Nazzano is the river. The Tiber draws a wide bend here until it gathers in the Farfa stream, and the old centre stands on one of the river terraces that the water isolated by eating away the right bank. In 1956, at the locality of Meana, a hydroelectric barrage was built: the lake of Nazzano formed, and around the lake was later born the nature reserve Tevere-Farfa, which the village tells about in its Museum of the River. Before the dam there was the ferry landing, which served the inhabitants for crossing to the other bank and for carrying the grain. Above everything stands the thirteenth-century castle, with two towers over the valley, and it is reached by a single road that climbs in a spiral through the village: there is no other in Lazio made that way.