Valmontone

The name means a valley overhung by a hill: the valley is that of the Sacco, the hill is the tuff rise called Montone on which the town stands, and the first mention, as Vallis Montonis, is in a document of 1139. What was here before, though, nobody knows for certain, and there is a precise reason: in February 1528 the landsknechts of Charles V put Valmontone to fire and sword, and the archives burned. In the eighteenth century the antiquarian Francesco de' Ficoroni recognised in certain ruins in the countryside of Lugnano the ancient Labicum; in 1880 Lugnano renamed itself Labico, and Valmontone answered by changing its coat of arms and putting a Labican warrior on it, with the motto PICTI SCUTA LABICI.

In 1651 the town passed to Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of pope Innocent X, who had an ambitious idea: to make of it an ideal city, the Città Pamphilia, and to raise it from the rank of a fief to that of a city by sheer building. Before him Taddeo Barberini had begun demolishing the old castle to put up a modern palace, and had finished only a fraction of it. In May and June 1944, by contrast, the Allies on their way to Rome bombed Valmontone again and again, since it stood on the Casilina road and on the railway: eighty per cent of the buildings were levelled, and the town was later awarded the silver medal for military valour.