The name first appears in a ninth-century document as mons Flasconis, and fiasco, flask, is a medieval word of Gothic origin: why it should have attached itself to a hill nobody knows. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, however, some humanists read it as mons Faliscorum, the mountain of the Falisci, and identified the town with ancient Falerii, which in fact stood where Civita Castellana is today. In 1853 Francesco Orioli, whose mother came from here, took the whole thing apart in a long article, calling it a mannerism of those scholars, for whom every town simply had to have a classical origin; contemporary local historians have ruled the Falisci out altogether. And yet in the town people still say Colle falisco, and one family, when the Council of Trent made surnames compulsory, chose to be called Falisci.
What the town is famous for, though, is a drinking bout. In 1111, so the legend goes, bishop Johannes Defuk was accompanying Henry V to Rome and sent his cupbearer Martino ahead to write Est — that is est bonum, there is good wine — beside the door of any inn where the wine was decent. Arriving here, Martino wrote it three times, with six exclamation marks. The bishop stopped for three days, then came back when the mission was over and never left again: he died, it seems, of too much drinking. He is buried in San Flaviano beneath a grey peperino slab that reads: «for too much EST! here lies dead my lord Johannes Defuk». He left the town twenty-four thousand scudi, on condition that on every anniversary a small barrel of wine be poured over his tomb.
