Grotte di Castro

Just outside the town there is a place called valle muje, the valley of the screams, and tradition explains why: they would be the cries of terror of the people of Civita, killed while the Lombards destroyed their city in the eighth century. Civita was an Etruscan town of some importance, standing on a hill along the road that goes down to Lake Bolsena, on the border between the territories of Vulci and Volsinii; for a long time it was called Tiro, but today it is simply called Civita di Grotte di Castro, because nobody knows its Etruscan name any more. The destruction was such that the survivors scattered to the places held safest, and out of that came Gradoli, San Lorenzo and Grotte: this last took its name from the caves beneath the rock, which can still be seen and which in case of attack served as a refuge. Contested for centuries between the Church and Orvieto, in 1537 it was bought by the Farnese and entered the duchy of Castro; when the duchy fell, it went back to the Papal State.

On the morning of the nineteenth of May 1860 a detachment of Garibaldians, landed at Talamone and having crossed into the Papal State to raise the countryside, took the town shouting long live Italy, drove out the papal gendarmes and hoisted the tricolour on the palace built by Vignola. In the afternoon the French who came from Montefiascone tried to retake it and were pushed back after a furious battle by the church of San Marco; then fresh forces arrived from Valentano and the Garibaldians had to go. The name too changed its mind more than once: in 1866 the town stopped being Castello delle Grotte and became Grotte San Lorenzo, and in 1877 it changed again into Grotte di Castro. In 1928 it gave honorary citizenship to the explorer Umberto Nobile, who returned the favour by dropping the town's pennant together with the Italian flag as he crossed the North Pole aboard the airship Italia. Underground, meanwhile, lies the necropolis of Centocamere: some fifty tombs linked to one another until they make a labyrinth.