The name of Gallese is often linked to the Gauls, and the local sources take the trouble to deny it, citing Florus and Eutropius, according to whom the remnants of the Gaulish army were wiped out entirely near lake Vadimo. The etymology is traced instead to Halesus, son of Agamemnon, who according to legend fled to Italy and founded Falerii, or, more prosaically, to a geographical word meaning a place exposed to the sun. From this town, which today counts a few thousand inhabitants, came two popes: Marinus the First, in the ninth century, and Romanus, at the end of the same century.
Gallese also had a diocese of its own for a long time. The neoclassical cathedral, the work of Pietro Camporese and his sons, was finished in 1796, and in 1805 a bull of Pius the Seventh gave it the title of cathedral: the diocese lasted until 1986, when it was united with that of Civita Castellana and the church became a co-cathedral. Outside the walls stands the Romanesque basilica of San Famiano, whose first building was completed in the thirteenth century and which has four naves on its lower level; the saint rests in a marble sarcophagus of 1733. The ducal palace, medieval in plan, was deeply reworked in the sixteenth century by Giacomo della Porta, a pupil of Vignola; the town had been raised to a duchy by Sixtus the Fifth in 1585.
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📅 Every year, on 8 August; the 17 July procession for the first miracle
Gallese celebrates Saint Famian on 8 August, in the basilica dedicated to him. On the morning of 17 July, the townspeople process to the small church where the saint's first miracle in Gallese is remembered.
A white wine carved into Etruscan tufa history, toasted by Garibaldi's Thousand: Orvieto has held Denominazione di Origine Controllata status since 1971.
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