Oriolo Romano

Oriolo was founded by contract. On the fifteenth of April 1560, before the notary Ser Pietro di Viano, Giorgio the Third Santacroce signed the contract made with the first inhabitants of Oriolo: he invited onto his lands peasants and woodcutters — the capannari — who came above all from Tuscany and Umbria, from Pistoia and Siena, granted them long leases and provided houses, on condition that they cleared the scrub. An inscription that once stood on the façade of the palace said the same thing in fewer words: that he cleared the forest of Manziana, brought colonists there in 1562, made the via Claudia travelled again, walled the castle, built the church of San Giorgio in 1570 and built that palace.

On the name there is no agreement. It might be, as at the other Oriolo, the Calabrian one, the hordeolus of Gerhard Rohlfs, the grain of barley; more probably it comes from aureus, golden, for the richness of the soil, or from a Roman personal name. The palace was enlarged in 1674 under Clement the Tenth, who was an Altieri, and is frescoed with landscapes of the family's other fiefs; the fountain of the Picche is a design of Vignola, and a set of tree-lined avenues, the Olmate, still links Oriolo to Montevirginio. Down in the gorges of the Mignone the air behaves the other way round: the further you go down the colder it gets, and the Mediterranean scrub of the plateau gives way to plants of a cooler country. The same volcanic ground gives off radon, and for that reason in 2010 the comune gave itself a new building code.