Faleria

The village was called Stabla, then Stabbia, then Castrum Stabie; the present name has been in force at least since 1873, and lately it has been proposed to go back to the old one. Where Stabbia came from is not certain: some derive it from the Latin stabulum, the posting station along an Etruscan or Roman road — on the Flaminia there is still an inn called of Stabbia — others from stabilis, stable, for the solidity of its strongholds. In the fourteenth century the place was taxed on a consumption of five rubbia of salt every six months. It belonged to the Anguillara, and of their history here two dates remain. On the first of November 1504 Girolama Farnese, wife of Giuliano Anguillara, suspected of having tried with her lovers to poison her son, was barbarously murdered by her stepson. And on the twenty-eighth of January 1563 a decree of Everso Anguillara set penalties for anyone who cut the oaks, because — the decree says — in a short time we should be left without woods.

A country road leads to what is left of Castel Paterno, which goes back to the eleventh century and where the emperor Otto III ended his earthly life, in January 1002: perhaps of poison, the chronicles say, given him by a woman whose husband the emperor had had beheaded on the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo. The castle was already abandoned in the fifteen hundreds, so much so that a boundary agreement calls it the ruined castle of Paterno; great pieces of the wall remain, and a wide arched gate. The local legends say the emperor's treasure is still there, and that it included a hen with seven golden chicks. In 1660 Stabia was bought by prince Borghese for a hundred and ten thousand scudi. The gates and the town walls were pulled down in 1900, for the new needs of the town. And in the courtyard of the Anguillara castle there was a travertine well with the family's arms on it: it has been stolen.