Carbognano

Where the name comes from nobody knows for certain, and the village offers four explanations. On the hill of Sant'Eutizio there was a temple to Janus, an ara Iani, which would have become Arignano and then Carbognano; or else a Roman patrician called Carbilio built a villa here, and from Villa Caribilia they would have come to Carbiliano; or again a Roman family, the Carbones, remembered by Tacitus too, had property in this territory; or, more simply, the chestnuts and oaks of the Selva Cimina were used to make charcoal, carbone. In a document of 817 the place is a fundum Carbonianum belonging to the abbey of Farfa, and in a bull of 1443 it is called Corvignanum. Certain news begins in the tenth century, with Farfa; in the fourteenth century it belonged to the Prefetti di Vico, then passed to the Apostolic Chamber.

In 1494 pope Alexander VI Borgia granted Carbognano to Orsino Orsini, lord of Bassanello, and to his wife Giulia Farnese, who lived here until 1522. During that long stay in the castle she had the church of Santa Maria della Concezione built. In 1630 Urban VIII raised the village to a principality and gave it to the Colonna, who later took the name Colonna Barberini di Sciarra and kept it until 1870. In the middle of the village there is a church that deserves a line of its own: San Filippo Neri, put up in 1636 by Orazio Giustiniani, a priest of the saint's own congregation who later became a cardinal — it is the first church in the world built in honour of Filippo Neri. And in the church of the Madonna della Valle there is a Madonna and Child by Antonio del Massaro of Viterbo, the man they called il Pastura.