Palombara Sabina

The name comes from doves. In the eighth century the place is called Palumba or Palumbus, and the dovecotes and the widespread raising of doves explain it; the form Palumbaria appears in the ninth century and may come from an estate granted in emphyteusis, the casa Palumbi, or from Palumbi farae, the fara — that is the Lombard family clan — of a certain Palumbus. The town was a possession of the abbey of Farfa, in the eleventh century a fief of the Lombard duke Alberic, in 1279 of the Savelli, and in 1600 the Savelli sold it to the Borghese, who became its dukes. It has been called Palombara Sabina only since 1870, when after the breach of Porta Pia it entered the Kingdom of Italy.

The old town clings entirely to a hill at the foot of Monte Gennaro and was born with the incastellamento, around the tenth century, when people gathered about a castle to feel safe. First came the watchtower, of the ninth century, which had eight floors; then the houses, with lanes that climb and wind in a spiral. Halfway up runs the Muro del soccorso, about a hundred metres long, once merloned and pierced by thirty-seven loopholes, which joined the cylindrical tower to the fortress. At the top stands the castle of the Savelli, later Torlonia, built by the Crescenzi Ottaviani: in the sixteenth century Troilo Savelli had it rebuilt and frescoed by his friend Baldassarre Peruzzi, and his portraits of famous Romans, his allegories of the liberal arts and his grotesques can still be seen. Today the castle houses a library, a natural science museum and the Roman marble sculptures found in 1986 at Formello: one of them, a female figure, is a copy of a work by the Greek sculptor Cephisodotus representing Eirene, the personification of Peace. In the countryside of Cretone fossils have been found, among them that of an Elephas, now in the paleontological museum of the Sapienza.