Caprarola

Caprarola has 5,345 inhabitants on a tufa spur on the slopes of the Cimini mountains, and the name is about goats: it comes from the Latin capreae and from a dialect word for the place with the stalls where shepherds sheltered the flock. What the town is known for, though, is Palazzo Farnese, and its shape is an accident. Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had Antonio da Sangallo the Younger begin a fortress on a pentagonal plan with five corner bastions; then the work stopped because the cardinal was elected pope. His grandson took it up again and handed it to Vignola, who kept the pentagon of the fortress and built a villa inside it. To reach it the medieval village was torn open: Vignola drove a straight road, the Via Dritta, which climbs from the foot of the hill to the square in front of the palace, filling in some ravines and crossing others on two bridges.

In the countryside there is a far older piece of engineering. Lake Vico fills a volcanic crater, and in Etruscan times its surface was halved by boring an underground channel through the mountain to let the water out into the valley, where it forms the Rio Vicano: the purpose was to gain fertile land. Then there is a much more recent story worth telling. After 8 September 1943 twenty-four members of a Roman Jewish family, the Veneziano, took refuge at Caprarola as guests of the Brunetti family; for eight months, until the Liberation, they were protected by many of the inhabitants and by the local authorities. In 2005 Roberto and Maria Brunetti were declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.