Canepina

The name of Canepina is a crop: it comes from canapa, hemp, and not merely as a figure of speech, because as late as the seventeenth century the place was one vast plantation, made possible by the many watercourses that cross the territory. Hence the name Canapina, which became Canepina in the following century. Today the fields have given way to woodland: eighty-two per cent of the municipal territory is covered with trees, the highest share in the province of Viterbo, and above all with sweet chestnut. In the valley of the Rio Francina there survives a Roman sanctuary of the waters, three great blocks of volcanic rock dedicated to the Bona Dea.

The castle was built about the middle of the eleventh century by the prefects of Vico on a crag then unreachable, to watch the Tiber plain from its eastern tower. Adrian the Fourth bought it in 1154, from 1174 it passed to Viterbo, which in 1332 gave it to the Holy See, and in 1544 it entered the duchy of Castro, where it remained until 1649. On the fifth of June 1944 Allied aircraft, trying to block the German retreat, mistook their target and hit the built-up area instead of the bridge: a hundred and fifteen people died. The village also keeps a dialect so conservative that even its neighbours find it hard, and in 2014 a dictionary of it was compiled.