The village appears in the documents in 1077, but its fortune begins in 1160, when one Enotrio Serco raised at the top of the slope the fortified residence that over the centuries became a princely palace. What changed everything were the Giustiniani, Genoese merchants, to whom Clement VIII made Bassano over in 1595: in 1605 the fief was raised to a marquisate and the building began — the hunting lodge called La Rocca, the granaries, the church of San Vincenzo, the ponte delle Vaschie — and Francesco Albani, Domenichino and Antonio Tempesta came to work here. In 1644 a bull of Innocent X made the fief a principality, and the visits of popes and princes began, among them James Stuart, pretender to the throne of England; in 1735 the Giustiniani brought the maiolica master Bartolomeo Terchi here from Siena. In the monastery of San Vincenzo, which is their work, is kept the statue of Michelangelo's first Christ of the Minerva.
The other churches, by contrast, were built by stories. Tradition says that Saint Gratilianus, beheaded in 313, appeared in a dream to the hermit who kept his relic at Capranica and ordered him to carry his head to Bassano: the hermit set out, and just short of the village the head rolled into the bushes. There, in 1546, the people of Bassano built the church of San Gratiliano. Not far off stands Santa Maria dei Monti, raised because the Virgin was said to have driven off a dragon and the spirits that plagued the shepherds: the procession in her honour has been held every year since 1479 and has never been broken. On 5 May 1312 the emperor Henry VII slept here on his way to Rome to be crowned. In the Second World War the village was occupied by the Wehrmacht's bridging engineers and the partisans were very active: among them Mariano Buratti, gold medal for military valour. The name, from Bassano di Sutri, became Bassano Romano in 1964.
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📅 Every year, on 12 August, with the Giustiniani Summer Carnival
Bassano Romano celebrates Saint Gratilianus on 12 August, in the church dedicated to him. Summer brings the Summer Carnival, a seventeenth-century historical re-enactment dedicated to the Giustiniani family, the fief's historic owners.
A white wine carved into Etruscan tufa history, toasted by Garibaldi's Thousand: Orvieto has held Denominazione di Origine Controllata status since 1971.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Bassano Romano, but an easy day trip away.
