Vignanello

The village's coat of arms carries an abbreviation that nobody can unravel. A white band divides the two fields and bears the letters V.N.C.: some read Vignanello nel Cimino, some Vignanello nobilis communitas, some see in it the three crops of the place, wine, hazelnuts and chestnuts. Above there is a golden bunch of grapes, below six hills topped by a star — five-pointed on the arms, six-pointed on the ceiling of the council chamber. The comune uses it freely, although it has never been granted by decree: the first version like today's appears on a municipal document of 1899.

The first official mention of the place is of 604: an olivetum in feudo Julianelli, given by Gregory the Great to the Vatican basilica. A legend put into verse by Giuseppe Manini, who arrived here at the end of the nineteenth century, tells that in 410, after Alaric's sack of Rome, people in flight took refuge in the woods of the Cimini and formed a vicus between the streams; their leader was said to be one Giuliano, and from Giulianello came Uignanello and then Vignanello, with the vineyards round about lending a hand. In 1169 Frederick Barbarossa took the village from the Church, which had it back in the fifteenth century; then it passed to the Ruspoli, from whom Pius VII removed the government in 1816. At the plebiscite of October 1870 six hundred and sixty-three men of Vignanello out of nine hundred and ten entitled voted to join the Kingdom of Italy; at the parliamentary elections in November, under the property franchise, those entitled to vote in the village were twenty-two.