Acquapendente

Acquapendente has 5,655 inhabitants at the far north of Lazio, on the Via Cassia and a few kilometres from the borders with Tuscany and Umbria: it is one of only five comuni in Lazio whose territory touches more than one region other than its own. The name says exactly what it means, "hanging water", for the little falls that drop into the river Paglia, and it appears for the first time in a document of the emperor Otto I of 964, who stayed here himself. The town grew because the Via Francigena passed through it, the road that brought northern Europe to Rome and to the ports of embarkation for the Holy Land.

In 1166, though, something happened that changed the shape of the place. Tradition calls it the miracle of the Madonna del Fiore; what followed is documented: the people rose against the imperial rule of Barbarossa and pulled the castle down, and having pulled it down they began to build in the valley instead, near the stream and the land they could clear. The old course of the Francigena through the upper town fell out of use, and a straighter one took its place, entering by the Ripa gate and leaving by the Roman one. The clock tower is still called the Barbarossa tower. Five centuries later the town received something from another town's destruction: when in 1649 pope Innocent X had the city of Castro besieged and razed, the bishop's seat was moved here and the basilica of the Santo Sepolcro became a cathedral.