This village was designed on paper. The old San Lorenzo stood lower down, near lake Bolsena, among the caves that gave it its name; when the level of the lake rose, the ground began to slide and the malaria began to kill, the pope decided to move the whole population up here, onto the hill, and had a new settlement built to the design of the architect Francesco Navone: a sort of ideal city, drawn to the town-planning canons of its century. It was founded in 1774, and it still has that face: low, uniform houses, straight streets, and a large octagonal square with the church of San Lorenzo standing on it. Over the main door are the arms of pope Pius VI.
Behind them the people had left a whole village, and in the second half of the eighteen hundreds the old one became a refuge for the brigands of the district. In 1867, on Monte Landro, inside this comune, Garibaldians and papal troops fought each other. Between May and June 1944 the Allied bombing struck San Lorenzo Nuovo hard, with a good many dead. On the boundary with Bolsena there is a marker stone they call the sasso della graticola — the gridiron being the instrument with which Saint Lawrence was killed — with the letters S and L cut on the side that faces the village. The arms of the comune were recognised by decree in 1941 and carried, as the law of the day required, the chief of the Littorio.
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📅 Every year, on 10 and 11 August
On 10 August San Lorenzo Nuovo, a municipality of 2,166 inhabitants in the province of Viterbo, celebrates its patron Saint Lawrence the martyr (san Lorenzo martire), with the fiera di San Lorenzo on the 11th.
A white wine carved into Etruscan tufa history, toasted by Garibaldi's Thousand: Orvieto has held Denominazione di Origine Controllata status since 1971.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Lorenzo Nuovo, but an easy day trip away.
