Capodimonte

Capodimonte stands on a promontory of the lake of Bolsena, which formed more than three hundred thousand years ago when some volcanoes of the Volsini chain collapsed into their own caldera. The promontory has been lived on since the Bronze Age: in 2011, along the stretch of shore between here and the Pajeto, some forty finds came to light — pottery and animal remains — and comparison with similar finds on the other shores of the lake made it possible to identify a late Bronze Age settlement on this very headland. A few kilometres north, sheer above the water, stood Bisenzio, an important Etruscan and then Roman centre, the municipium of Visentum, a bishop's see; a good part of what has been dug up there is now in the Villa Giulia museum in Rome. The Lombards destroyed it in the seventh century, and part of the survivors of Bisenzio and of Cornassa moved to this more sheltered promontory, giving rise to the village that stands here now. The first document that calls it Capo di Monte is of 1102.

The village long depended on the counts of Bisenzio, then passed into the orbit of Orvieto, and in 1385 it was assigned to the Farnese: it was they who built the fortress that still dominates it. The Rocca Farnese is a sixteenth-century mass raised around the medieval tower, and it has been unfinished for centuries: it looks halfway between a fortress and a palace. Inside it, in 1618, died Petrus Gonsalvus, who in his own day was famous for his hypertrichosis. In 1649, with the fall of the Duchy of Castro, Capodimonte entered the Papal State; in 1807 pope Pius VII sanctioned the definitive union to the comune of the castle of Bisenzio and of the Bisentina island, which lies out in the lake; and in 1870 the village entered the Kingdom of Italy. The arms are unusual: a mount of three green peaks bearing, on its central summit, the head of a woman crowned with laurel. Below the village there is a long beach of volcanic sand.