Villa San Giovanni in Tuscia

The name says villa, and a villa there truly is: the old centre grew on the remains of a Roman villa, whose phases of life are dated to the third and fourth centuries after Christ, and in via delle Fortezze you can still see some pieces of floor with black-and-white mosaics. The second half of the name arrived instead in the sixteenth century, when pope Leo X, to thank him for the services rendered to the Church, granted these lands to the condottiero Renzo da Ceri, of the Orsini-Anguillara family: it was his descendants who founded the borgo and named it after Saint John, in honour of a member of the family. Further back still are the Etruscans, with the necropolises of Ponton Graziolo and of the Grottone, where some chamber tombs have benches along the walls and a ceiling worked like a double-pitched roof.

From a note in the archives of 1882 it is known that there was also a wall circuit of Roman date here: a considerable fragment of it remains, which in the village they call la Torraccia. The parish church of San Giovanni Battista keeps five altarpieces of the eighteenth century: the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, signed by Francesco Guerrini in 1756, and Saints Alban and Benedicta, co-patrons of the village, attributed to the same painter; then the Passing of Saint Joseph, the Souls in Purgatory and Saint Jerome with Saint Anthony Abbot. The other church is Santa Maria ad Nives, of the seventeenth century. The village stands at three hundred and twenty-nine metres, between the hills of Poggio Aguzzo and Le Querciole, among the olive groves and the woods of turkey oak and chestnut that make the landscape of the Tuscia.