Celleno

Celleno stands on a spur of tuff, among the badlands of the Teverina, between Lake Bolsena and the valley of the Tiber. To the south, at the boundary with Viterbo, the stream has dug the gorge of the Infernaccio: sheer walls more than sixty metres high, a waterfall, and water so full of iron that on the surface it runs red above the bluish bed. People were on the plateau in Etruscan times already, from the seventh century before Christ: so say a great cistern for water, reused in the Middle Ages as a refuse pit, and an amphora that served for raising dormice, about a century later, kept in the village museum. The necropoleis dug in the nineteenth century gave rich grave goods and the Etrusco-Corinthian pottery that scholars call the Celleno Group. The castle is recorded from 1026 and in the sixteenth century was a fief of the Orsini, whose name it still bears.

That village, though, is no longer there. The ground was giving way, and after the earthquake of 1931 the move began to be planned: from 1935 New Celleno was built, at the Poggetti, two kilometres further on. On 24 December 1951 president Luigi Einaudi authorised the forced transfer of the population, and the old borgo was then brought down with dynamite, so that nobody should come back to live there. A few years earlier, in this same territory, the South African troops had fought their first engagement in Italy. Of what was there before remain the spur, the castle and the finds that the digs have carried to the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia.