San Polo dei Cavalieri

In 1558 the fief passed to the Cesi, and Federico Cesi — the man who founded the Accademia dei Lincei — chose this village as the seat of the Academy itself: the first modern scientific academy in Europe had its address in a hill town of the Lucretili mountains. The castle where it sat is still there, the Orsini-Cesi-Borghese: the central keep is dated to the year 960, the patronal halls keep fourteenth-century frescoes, and a plaque placed by the Lincei recalls one of its later owners. The village had been founded in the eleventh century by the monks of San Paolo and remained theirs until the fourteenth; the first historical mention is of 1081, when pope Gregory the Seventh confirmed that the fief belonged to the abbey of San Paolo fuori le mura. The sale from the monks to the Orsini was regularised in the fifteenth century, and in 1479 Napoleone Orsini granted the village its own statute. The second half of the name came later, after an order of knights passed this way.

The plague of 1656 left only three hundred and seventy-seven people alive here, and the repopulation was entrusted — apparently, for the accounts are not clear — to a single family, since the owners of the time took no interest at all in how many people lived on their lands. Two centuries later the trouble was water: the springs were not enough for a growing population, and when the shortage reached the hamlet of Marcellina another aqueduct had to be built, buying two springs from a marquis in a neighbouring comune. The disputes between Marcellina and San Polo grew steadily more bitter until, on the fifth of July 1909, it was decided to make Marcellina an autonomous comune — which was not, however, enough to close the matter. In 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi had come through here with Anita and the volunteers fleeing Rome after the fall of the Republic: to throw off the armies pursuing him he made as though to go on from Tivoli towards Arsoli, and instead took the road to San Polo.