Vasanello

Until 1949 the village was called Bassanello; the present name and the coat of arms — a two-handled amphora — say the same thing, that is the trade practised here for ever: that of the potters. The oldest written document of Vasanello, by contrast, is a tomb inscription, and it reads: «Here rests San Lanno, martyr of Christ, dead under Diocletian». The saint's relics were found on the fifteenth of March 1628 by order of bishop Gozzadini, and with them a thick fragment of terracotta, the «brick of San Lanno», which confirmed the identification of the body and the date of the martyrdom.

In 1212 pope Innocent III entrusted the administration of the place to the podestà of Orte; soon afterwards the Orsini seized it, and to them the first core of the castle is owed. In 1489 Orsino Orsini, lord of Bassanello, married Giulia Farnese; in 1505 the fief passed as the dowry of their daughter Laura to Nicola Della Rovere, Orsino having died five years earlier under a collapsing floor of the castle. Then came the Colonna and the Colonna-Barberini, until the end of the papal state. The castle was bought in 1907 by monsignor Luigi Misciattelli, and it was his nephew Paolo who revived the art of ceramics.