Corchiano

The village stands on a tufa plateau formed between four hundred thousand and ninety-five thousand years ago by the volcanic caldera that is now the lake of Vico, and the old borgo looks down into the gorge of the rio Fratta. The name is said to come from Hortiano, and behind it, probably, Horta, the Etruscan goddess of agriculture. The ancient town has been identified with Fescennium, which the literary sources name as the birthplace of the Fescennine verses, the licentious improvised songs of early Rome. This was Faliscan country: the rock tombs of the Genitura necropolis and the cut-roads belong to that world, and after Rome destroyed Falerii, in 241 before Christ, the via Amerina was laid, which is still preserved here as a paved Roman road, with a bridge and its waterworks among the gorges.

The place was reinhabited around the year one thousand and took the name Hortiano; the Orsini held it until 1472, and in 1534 Paul the Third put it into the duchy of Castro, which he had given to his son Pier Luigi Farnese. That was the best period for the architecture of the village, and the Farnese built a new rocca there — which began to die after Castro itself was razed, in 1649, and was finally pulled down in 1979, leaving only a few stumps. The churches keep what the village could pay for: on the door of Sant'Antonio an inscription records that two men, Egidio Ranaldi and Domenico Celli, founded it in 1478; on the portal of Sant'Egidio, between two griffins, are the words EX ELEMOSINIS and the year 1510, that is, out of the alms. In San Biagio there is a cycle of votive frescoes of about 1468, signed by Pancrazio Jacovetti da Calvi.