Tolfa

Two things carry this village's name a great deal further than the village goes. The first is archaeological: the full phase of the mid-Tyrrhenian final Bronze Age is universally called the Tolfa phase, from the bronzes of the Coste del Marano hoard. The second is economic. Between 1460 and 1462 cardinal Giovanni di Castro found alunite here, that is, alum: the mordant without which the textile industry could not dye cloth, and which until then had come from the East by way of Venice, from deposits that the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had put out of reach. In 1463 pope Pius II granted him the working of the mines for twenty-five years, and the papacy found a European monopoly in its hands.

The proceeds, the pope decided, were to pay for the war against the Turks: a notarial act of 1513 kept in the Vatican Archive, renewing Agostino Chigi's lease under Leo X, is headed Appaltum Alluminum Sanctae Crociatae, the alum contract of the Holy Crusade. Tolfa grew so fast that in 1530 Clement VII gave it the statutes of an autonomous comune and the town spilled out of its walls; and the works built beside the pits, four kilometres away, with the housing for the workmen, became a village of its own: Allumiere, an autonomous comune from 1826. Then the falls: in 1799, after the revolt against the Roman Republic, French troops sacked the town and finished off the Frangipane fortress; and on 10 October 1943 twelve men, probably soldiers scattered after the armistice, were killed here by the Germans. Tolfa has lost its sea as well: it went to Santa Marinella when that became a comune, and what remains is a few rights of common use at the mouth of the Rio Fiume.