Gradoli

The name comes from a stair. The medieval castle, built where the Pergola quarter now is, could be entered only by a steep flight of steps, in Latin gradus, and from that came Gradoli. Of the castle there remain a round tower swallowed by a private house, the entrance arch and pieces of wall; the ditch has become streets and squares, but its shape can still be seen. The Castrum Gradolorum appears for the first time in 1113, among the properties Matilda of Canossa gave to the papacy. Then came the years of Orvieto: in 1296 an agreement laid down that the podestà of the lake communes should be appointed one year by the Holy See and one year by the Umbrian city, and in 1297 Gradoli and Latera rebelled against Orvieto's envoys. From 1445 the fief belonged to the Farnese: cardinal Alessandro, later pope Paul III, had the castle's ruins pulled down and built his palace there, and the growth that followed drew a small Jewish community which settled outside the walls, in a place still called Ghetto.

In April 1978, during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the name of this village was given as the place where he was being held: the tip, by the accounts, came from a séance held in a villa in the countryside near Bologna. On 6 April the police blocked the roads into the village and searched the farmhouses around. Moro was not here: the Red Brigades' hideout was in Rome, in a street called via Gradoli. Where the information really came from is still argued over. On the lake shore the church of San Magno, built in the 15th century by the Knights of Malta, holds a privilege: on 19 August those who attend Mass there gain the plenary indulgence granted by Benedict XIV in 1774. Eleven kilometres of the Bolsena shore belong to the comune.