Olevano Romano

Olevano Romano has 6,742 inhabitants on Monte Celeste, at the edge of the Prenestini mountains. In the nineteenth century this village was a kind of open-air school: more than a thousand European painters passed through it — German, Danish, English, French — who on their journey to Italy came here to learn to paint the light, the rocks and the oaks. The first was the Tyrolean Joseph Anton Koch, who went on to marry a local girl, Cassandra Ranaldi; Corot worked here, and in the church of San Rocco lies Franz Theobald Horny, who died very young. The civic museum keeps more than two thousand works, and the German art academy still sends its fellows here.

On the town's coat of arms, above the three hills with the olive tree, are the letters SPQR. They are not a Roman affectation: the Senate of the Roman Republic granted them in 1849, when a column of men from Olevano broke through the siege of Rome to bring supplies into the city. Garibaldi reviewed them and described them in these words: "barefoot, dirty, ragged, but with such knives...". Today the village is known for something else again: cesanese, the native red grape that has its denomination of origin here.