Castiglione in Teverina

The village was sold to the Farnese in 1539 and became part of the duchy of Castro; and there it stayed until 1637, when the people of Castiglione — tired, says the source, of passing from one master to another — bought themselves out. That is, they bought their own village, taking on a debt of twenty thousand scudi to do it. Two centuries later the place found itself on a frontier again: after 1860 it was still part of the Papal State but lay less than a kilometre from the border of the Kingdom of Italy, and to that kingdom it was annexed on the eighteenth of September 1870, two days before the breach of Porta Pia.

The village grew around a fortress from about the year 1000, and in 1351 it took in the inhabitants of Paterno, which had been destroyed; the fortress of the Monaldeschi still looks over the main square, with two towers flanking the entrance, pointed arches, arrow slits and the marks of an old drawbridge. The church of the Madonna della Neve was built at the beginning of the fifteen hundreds around an image that was venerated where it had been painted: on the door of a farmhouse. The church of San Rocco went up in the fourteen hundreds to serve as a hospital for plague victims, and keeps on its end wall a fresco of 1485. And in the old cellars of the Vaselli counts the village has put the largest wine museum in Italy. In the last war, in March 1944, seven men of an anti-fascist band were surprised in a cave at Sermugnano after an informer spoke: they were tortured and then shot in a gravel quarry near Orvieto.