Vallerano

In the summer of 1707 George Frideric Handel was at Vignanello, the guest of Francesco Maria Ruspoli, and he took to coming over to play the organ not only in the main church of the village that lodged him, but also in the church of the Ruscello, here at Vallerano. On the eighteenth of June of that year, before the Farnese, lords of Vallerano, and the Ruspoli, he presented in that church his Salve Regina, with Margherita Durastante as soprano and himself at the organ. The instrument is still there: a monumental organ of 1644. The church that holds it was built between 1605 and 1609 to a design by Vignola, and it keeps an Assumption by Giovanni Lanfranco and an Ecstasy of Saint Charles Borromeo by Antonio Circignani; since 1993 it has been dedicated to blood donors.

The church of San Vittore, the patron, stands at the highest point of the village. It was built in the thirteenth century, lengthened in the next, and then closed to worship in the sixteenth because the building was in bad condition; shortly before they shut it, someone whose name is unknown painted the frescoes of the presbytery. It reopened in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, and it was then that the choir and the coffered ceiling were made, one hundred and sixteen panels dated 1762. The baptistery is older than all the rest: it is of 1450. The village's statute was signed by duke Orazio Farnese in 1534 and approved two years later by a bull of Paul the third issued at Viterbo, and the golden lily of the Farnese is still on the comune's arms. Outside the built-up area, in a wall of tufa, three floors of caves were dug for the Benedictines: this is the hermitage of San Leonardo, where the church could be entered both by its door and by a stair coming down from the top floor of the caves. Older than everything else are the Etruscan and Faliscan rock tombs of this territory, which later generations used as dwellings, haylofts and stables.