Blera

Until 1952 the town was called Bieda; in that year it took back the name it had borne in antiquity, Blera, the one recorded by Strabo, Pliny and the Tabula Peutingeriana, which the Middle Ages had worn down to Bleda and then to Bieda. What it means is not clear: some have connected it with a pre-Greek word for a kind of nettle, others, quite hypothetically, with an Etruscan personal name. The town sits on a tongue of tufa at the meeting of two streams, and its great age was the Etruscan one, when it stood at a crossing of the roads that joined Cerveteri and Tarquinia to the inland cities. The via Clodia passed through: of it there remain stretches cut into the rock and two bridges, the Ponte del Diavolo and the Ponte della Rocca, of the first and second centuries before Christ.

Blera was among the first dioceses and had bishops of its own from 457 to 1093, when it was joined to that of Toscanella; tradition makes the first of them Saint Vivenzio, who is still the patron and who appears in pontifical robes on the town's banner. Pope Sabinian was born here, and for a long time Paschal the Second was believed to be from here as well: which is why the town still has a Piazza dei Papi, named for two pontiffs of whom only one was really its own. In 772 king Desiderius besieged and destroyed it; in 1247 the army of Frederick the Second destroyed it again, in reprisal against the family that held it. Its oldest surviving communal statutes are of 1515. From the nineteenth century the necropoli around it drew the archaeologists of Europe: a German mission came in 1914, and around the nineteen-sixties the Swedish Institute, with the king of Sweden himself taking part, began the systematic study that brought to light the villages of San Giovenale and Luni sul Mignone.