Vejano

The village stands on a spur of tufa, where two streams run into the Mignone, and its fortress is half quarried and half built: the lower part is cut directly out of the rock, the upper part is raised in brick. It has a triangular plan, with three massive towers at the corners, a wide deep ditch all around, and you go in over a bridge of tufa and wood. Cesare Borgia destroyed it in 1496; Onofrio III Santacroce made it again in 1518. The Santacroce lost it when Onofrio III was beheaded and the fief went to the Apostolic Chamber; the Orsini took it back by a pope's decree, sold it on to the Altieri, and the Altieri held it for three centuries, until their family died out.

Nobody is sure about the name: some derive it from Veio, the Etruscan city defeated by the Romans, whose survivors are supposed to have founded a new community here, and some from a late medieval word for the crossing of four roads — and the old part of Vejano is in fact made of four streets, paved in brick and flint, that run round the walls of the castle. The village was called Viano, then Veggiano from 1845, and Vejano only from 1872. On 5 June 1944 an Anglo-American bombing badly damaged the parish church, which is of the thirteen hundreds, and destroyed another church entirely: both were rebuilt after the war. And here too there is an università agraria, the body that administers the property held in common, heir to a medieval institution.