Vicovaro

Vicovaro is the village of Varia. Ancient Varia, on the road down to the plain of Rome, was sacked by the Lombards in 589 and again a few years later, but it was the Saracens, in 877, who made staying impossible: the place was abandoned, and only in the twelfth century, the invasions over, a modest village formed again on the crumbling ruins, and was called Vico Varie. In 1191 Celestine III gave it to the Orsini, who fortified and enlarged it, making it the outer wall of Rome: in the castle Alexander VI met Alfonso II of Aragon, and the village later held out against Cesare Borgia.

The finest thing here is an unfinished tomb. The octagonal tempietto of San Giacomo was commissioned by Giovanni Antonio Orsini, who died in 1458: the lower part, with its portal divided into twenty-four niches, is by Domenico da Capodistria, the upper by Giovanni Dalmata. At the archbishop's death the work stopped, and precisely because it was left unfinished the tempietto never received the Orsini burials. On the seventh of June 1944 the Germans killed twenty-eight civilians here: the monument to the Martyrs of the Pratarelle remembers them.