Valentano

In 1649, when the war of Castro ended with the destruction of Castro, capital of the Farnese duchy, Valentano became the administrative centre of that territory and took in its historical archive: the papers of a city that no longer existed were kept here. Two centuries later Valentano lost its own. The village housed a garrison of papal Zouaves, and in 1870, while the taking of Rome was being celebrated, the Zouaves burned almost all the papers of the communal historical archive in the main square — although some precious and irreplaceable documents were saved, along with the administrative records of destroyed Castro. The Farnese had held the place since 1354, when cardinal Albornoz granted them the Rocca, which was rapidly turned from a defensive castle into a residence: here lived Alessandro Farnese, later pope Paul the Third, and his sister Giulia, and here were born the great cardinal Alessandro, two dukes, a cardinal and a duchess of Urbino.

In 1731 the Rocca was turned into an enclosed convent and so remained until 1930; from that period comes the scala santa, frescoed with scenes of the Passion which covered over the Farnese decoration. In June 1944 a shell exploded inside the gate called Portonaccio, where seven civilians had taken shelter, and killed them; the gate still bears the mark, because one of its stones is missing. Below the village lies the small volcanic lake of Mezzano, which historians identify with the Lacus Statoniensis described by Seneca and by Pliny the Elder: on its shores stood pile-dwelling villages of the Bronze Age, and what has been recovered from the water since the nineteen-seventies — tools of stone, of bronze and of pottery — is displayed in the museum inside the Rocca. From this territory also came a majestic marble torso of Jupiter, which ended up in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.