Poggio Mirteto (RI)

Poggio Mirteto is in the province of Rieti, at 250 meters above sea level on the ridge that separates the Tiber valley from the first hills of Sabina, and its historic center gravitates around Piazza Martiri della Libertà, 02047 Poggio Mirteto (RI). From Rome it is about 55-65 kilometers depending on the route. By car you take the A1 Milano-Napoli motorway, exit at Fiano Romano and continue on the SS 313 Ternana to Poggio Mirteto Scalo, from where the provincial road climbs to the town in about 10 minutes. Alternatively, Via Tiberina (SP 15/a) from Prima Porta, slower and more beautiful. By train you use the regional line FL1 Orte-Fiumicino Aeroporto, with departures from Roma Tiburtina, Ostiense and Trastevere and a stop at Poggio Mirteto, which however is at the Scalo, in the valley-floor hamlet, about 8 kilometers from the historic center. From there you go up with the municipal city buses or with a taxi ride, and on holidays it is best to check the schedules before leaving. Cotral buses connect the town with Rieti and with the station (schedules on cotralspa.it). The streets of the historic center are narrow and partly limited to traffic. You park along the ring road and in the parking areas around the square, then continue on foot. Visiting the town costs nothing: the churches have free entrance during opening hours, the cathedral follows the Mass schedule (weekdays at 7:30 and 17:30 in winter, 19:00 in summer, holidays at 8:00, 10:00, 11:30 and the evening Mass) published by the parish on smassunta.it. The church of San Paolo opens on occasions and for guided visits arranged with the parish. For the historic center two or three hours are enough. With San Paolo, the hamlet of Castel San Pietro and a stop at the Scalo you fill a whole day, which is completed by Farfa Abbey a quarter of an hour away by car.

Poggio Mirteto is the gateway to the Bassa Sabina and the most convenient base for exploring it. The starting point is the page dedicated to Rieti and its province, while the overall picture of day trips from Rome is in the section on the tourist attractions of Lazio.

Why Poggio Mirteto Is Not a Village Like the Others

There are towns that tell their own story and towns that have to be questioned. Poggio Mirteto belongs to the second category. It doesn't have the little square with the well and the geraniums arranged for the camera lens, it doesn't have the monument that organizes the visit in your place. It has instead the unmistakable look of the centers that were important before becoming quiet: palaces with oversized portals, a square designed to hold crowds, a bishop's palace, a cathedral, a former courthouse, a theater of memory, a municipal library named after Peppino Impastato in the old Pretura building. With its roughly 6,000 inhabitants it is a real small town, with the market, the high schools for half the district, the banks, the bars where in the morning they argue about politics and the harvest. This is exactly what makes it useful for travelers: in Sabina the tiny villages are beautiful and closed at eight in the evening in winter. Poggio Mirteto is not.

The first time you get here almost by chance, with Farfa Abbey in mind, which is the magnet of the whole area, and Poggio Mirteto is only a name on a sign. Then you see the bulk of the historic center against the sky, you park, you climb on foot and the day changes its plan. Since then, for me, this is the key to enter the Bassa Sabina: the point from which the geography of the whole territory becomes understandable. Is it worth it? The short answer is yes, as long as you know what you are looking for. The long answer is the rest of this page.

How to Get to Poggio Mirteto (RI) and How to Get Around

Poggio Mirteto by Car

Those who travel by car have an easy life. From the A1 you exit at Fiano Romano and take the SS 313 Ternana, the road that goes up the valley toward the northeast and is the backbone of Sabina's road network: it connects Passo Corese to Terni passing under the town, at the level of the Scalo. It is a straight, well-signposted route, without hairpin bends until the last stretch, when you leave the valley floor and climb toward the hill. From the motorway exit to the historic center count a good 20 minutes in normal conditions, but it is better to calculate 30, because the state road crosses built-up areas and at peak hours local traffic slows down a lot. From Rieti you arrive instead by the SP 46 via Tancia, which crosses the Sabine Mountains passing under Monte Tancia: longer, but one of the most scenic roads in the province. From Via Salaria the SP 42 Mirtense branches off. Those coming down from Terni travel the Ternana in the opposite direction and can join Sabina at the level of Ponzano-Nazzano, entering through the Tevere-Farfa nature reserve: a way of arriving that is already half a trip.

Poggio Mirteto by Train on the FL1

The train deserves a separate discussion, because it is Poggio Mirteto's competitive advantage over almost all the other towns of inland Lazio. The regional line FL1, the one that connects Orte to Fiumicino Aeroporto crossing Rome from Tiburtina to Ostiense and Trastevere, stops at Poggio Mirteto with a regular service that on weekdays is frequent. It means you can get here without a car. There is, however, a detail that needs to be explained well, because it is the most common source of misunderstandings: the station is at the Scalo, that is, in the valley-floor hamlet that grew up around the railway, and between the station and the upper town there are about eight kilometers and a considerable difference in elevation. It is not a distance you cover on foot, especially in summer. The municipality runs some city lines that connect the center, the hamlets and the station, designed mostly for commuters and students: they work well on weekdays and thin out on Sunday. The golden rule is to check the schedules on the municipality's website the same day, or to ask at the station bar, where they usually know everything better than any website.

For those arriving by train, it is best to consider the Scalo not as an obstacle but as part of the visit. The hamlet is a well-preserved piece of the Italian 20th century: born around the tracks of the Roma-Orte line inaugurated in 1865, grown with commerce and small industry, it tells the second life of this territory, the one that begins when the train arrives and the hill towns stop being islands. Half an hour to cross it on foot before going up is not wasted time.

Parking, Visit Times and Seasons in Poggio Mirteto

On parking, a recommendation worth its weight in gold. The historic center has narrow streets, blind curves and passages where two cars cannot pass each other. The medieval core beyond Porta Farnese is pedestrian in practice. Don't try to enter: leave the car along the ring road and in the parking areas around Piazza Martiri della Libertà, and from there the town is very easy to walk. It is small, it is compact, and walking it is the only way to understand it. Those with mobility difficulties should know that the town is on a slope, with uneven paving in several stretches. It is not impassable, but it requires calm and suitable shoes.

On timing, an honest estimate. The historic center in the strict sense can be covered in a couple of hours walking attentively, going into the cathedral, climbing to Poggio Vecchio, looking out from Porta di Sotto. Half a day covers the town comfortably, including the church of San Paolo if it's open. A whole day lets you add Castel San Pietro and Farfa Abbey, which a few kilometers away is practically obligatory to understand the history of this territory, or nearby Fara in Sabina, which was the hill stronghold of the Farfa system. Those with two days can build a loop with Casperia, with its maze of alleys, and Roccantica, leaning against the mountain.

The best period depends on what you are looking for. Spring is the season of colors: the olive groves wake up, the broom explodes along the embankments, the air is clear and from the edge of the town you can see very far. Autumn is the season of substance: the olives are harvested, the mills are working, and those who love food find here the moment when Sabina gives its best. Summer is hot but not scorching as on the plain, because altitude and ventilation help, and the evenings are pleasant. In July, when it is held, the festival of great Italian cinema in the San Paolo park is one more reason. Winter is the most authentic and least visited season, and it is also that of the Carnevalone: it is cold, the town closes in a bit on itself, then on a Sunday of Lent it explodes.

The Services of Poggio Mirteto, Capital of the Bassa Sabina

One last practical note. Poggio Mirteto is not a village of 200 souls. It is a center with real administrative and commercial functions, seat of the Union of Municipalities of the Bassa Sabina and, until the suppression decided with Legislative Decrees 155 and 156 of September 7, 2012, of a section of the court. Here you find pharmacies, banks, post offices, supermarkets, bars and restaurants open even out of season, a school hub with high schools and technical institutes that gathers students from the whole valley. It is an enormous difference from the leftover towns of the interior. Anyone who uses Poggio Mirteto as a base to explore Sabina is reasoning intelligently, because behind them there is a town that works. For those planning a longer stay with a regional logic, the ItalyPlanner English guide to Lazio offers the overall picture, while those who prefer to rely on a professional for a day among the villages find on TourLeaderPro the tour guiding service with tour leaders who know how to make real times and transfers add up.

To close the practical chapter, a warning that holds for everyone: Poggio Mirteto should be visited on a weekday if you want to see it alive, and in the morning if you want to see the weekly market, whose day should be checked on the municipality's website. On Sunday the center slows down, many businesses close, the beauty of the architecture remains but the noise of the community is lost. Which, after all, is the thing that makes it truly worth coming here.

Before Poggio Mirteto: Sabines, Roman Villas and the Bagni di Lucilla

To understand Poggio Mirteto you have to start from a geographic image, not from a date. Imagine the Tiber coming down from the north toward Rome, wide and slow, and on its right a system of hills that rises gradually until it becomes the Sabine Mountains proper, with Monte Tancia closing the horizon. On this intermediate band runs a ridge line that has always been inhabited, because it is the point where you are safe from the floods and the malaria of the valley floor and you stay low enough to farm. Poggio Mirteto occupies exactly that line, at the foot of Monte San Cosimo, with the river four kilometers away, and its entire history is the consequence of this position.

Sabina is a very ancient name. The Sabines were one of the Italic peoples with whom Rome clashed and merged in the first centuries of its existence, and the abduction of the Sabine women, beyond the legend, tells of a real process: the absorption of a neighboring population through kinship and conflict together. In Roman times these hills were among the first to be integrated and covered with villas. In the territory of Poggio Mirteto the traces are many and were surveyed as early as 1885 by Professor Ercole Nardi, a local scholar we will meet again: ruins of baths on the Volpignano ditch, ruins at Prata nelle Ferrare and at Monte Vascello, and above all two villas in the San Valentino area. One is called the Casoni and tradition attributes it to Marcus Terentius Varro, the great scholar from Rieti. The other is known as the villa of the Bagni di Lucilla and dates to the first century. The attributions to individuals are 19th-century hypotheses, not documents. What is certain is the density of settlement, typical of the Tiber side of Sabina where Roman senators had their estates. In 1801 a mosaic with Diana of Ephesus came out of these fields, and today it is in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums. It is the most prestigious piece ever found here, and it is in Rome, as almost always happens with provincial finds.

Then there are the Castellacce di Montorso, which local tradition identifies with an ancient landing place on the Tiber, and the ruins of the Marcigliana woodland, where a fight between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is remembered. These are places for walkers and enthusiasts, without panels or equipped routes. If you want to see them, ask in town, because the tourist maps don't mark them. The river, meanwhile, stays within reach: the municipal territory borders the Nazzano, Tevere-Farfa nature reserve, the first river park in Lazio, where the Tiber widens into an artificial lake full of herons. It is the old unhealthy valley floor that medieval incastellamento had abandoned, now back as a landscape to protect.

The Ridge, Farfa and the Birth of Poggio Mirteto

The decisive leap happens in the Middle Ages, and it is a leap with a precise name: Farfa. The imperial abbey of Santa Maria, founded in the Lombard era and grown to become one of the richest monastic powers in Europe, controlled a territory that went far beyond the borders of Sabina. Poggio Mirteto was born inside this system, and born late compared with the neighboring castles: in the first half of the 13th century, when the inhabitants of the castles of Volpignano, Marcigliana, Montorso and San Valentino, scattered and hard to defend, gathered on this hill for reasons of safety. It is a textbook case of second-generation incastellamento: not a village that fortifies itself, but four communities that merge into a new one. The name, Podium Myrtetum, the hill of the myrtles, describes the vegetation that covered the hill before the olive tree conquered it. It is a concrete place name, like almost all Sabine ones, where places are named to say what is there. Even today, along the paths that go down toward the valley floor, you come across patches of myrtle and mastic in the uncultivated corners, a plant memory of the earlier landscape, and the myrtle ended up in the municipal coat of arms, surrounding the red tower on three hills.

The monument that documents this phase is the Palazzo Abbaziale, built between 1285 and 1300, with the severity of 13th-century civic architecture. It was the seat from which the abbot of Farfa administered the new castle. Being abbey land meant having protection but also paying tithes, rents and corvées, and above all not having jurisdictional autonomy. For a community that was growing and that, thanks to its position, was becoming a commercial hub, this condition became progressively unbearable, and the drive toward emancipation is the psychological key to understanding the character of this place still today. Poggio Mirteto remained a Farfa possession until the 16th century, when the abbey passed in commendam to the Farnese and with it the town. This is the moment when the center acquires its monumental gate, opened in 1576, and the Clock Tower. Other families followed and then the direct government of the Papal States, with a growing role as capital of the Bassa Sabina: people came here to sell and buy, to see the notary and the doctor, to go to school, to take care of what could not be taken care of in their own town.

The 19th century is the century of recognitions. In 1837 Gregory XVI granted Poggio Mirteto the title of city. In 1841 the town became a diocesan seat, with the church of the Assunta raised to cathedral and the first bishop, Nicola Crispigni, solemnly installed in 1842. The diocese would last until 1925, when it was united with the suburbicarian see of Sabina: since then the official title is Sabina-Poggio Mirteto and the titular bishop is a cardinal, which makes this hill town, on paper, one of the seven historic cardinal sees around Rome. Few people know it, and even fewer know that in 1993 John Paul II came here to visit its cathedral. A town grown in the shadow of an abbey and under papal government produces, when the moment comes, the revolt of 1861 and an anticlerical carnival: the logic, when you think about it, is consistent. Whoever has spent centuries claiming autonomy from feudal ecclesiastical power has a cultural predisposition to claim it from temporal power as well.

A Curiosity About Poggio Mirteto (RI)

In one sentence, this is why Poggio Mirteto is more interesting than many more photogenic villages: it is a town that took freedom with its own hands and has never stopped remembering it. But the curiosity I tell first is not a battle. It is a factory. A few steps below the main square, going down Via San Paolo, you arrive at Piazza della Vetreria, where a brick chimney still rises among the houses. It is what remains of the Poggio Mirteto glassworks, the crystal works founded in 1826 by the Faiella family and considered the first Italian factory of glass plates, the first industrial-type establishment built in the Papal States outside Rome. Giuseppe Marocco, who in 1833 published his description of the Monuments of the Papal State, wrote that the crystal works aroused the admiration of cultured foreigners and artists: in a town of olive trees and sheep, two days by cart from Rome, glass was blown and plates were rolled.

The thing nobody connects is that this factory explains the rest of the story. A glassworks means workers, and concentrated workers means a social class that did not exist in the other Sabine castles, made up of farmers and canons. It was precisely the glassworks workers who, on February 27, 1861, asked in a delegation to the commissioner Gioacchino Napoleone Pepoli for the annexation of Poggio Mirteto to the nascent Kingdom of Italy, three days after the revolt that had driven out the papal authorities. The Carnevalone Liberato, the most anomalous festival in Lazio, has its roots in that chimney smoke. Today the glassworks is gone, the surviving buildings house restaurants and bars, and the square is one of the most pleasant places to sit in the evening. But if you look at the chimney knowing what it meant, the town changes its face. Those who want to dig deeper will find the volume by Valeria Bacci, La fabbrica dei cristalli, published in 2010, which reconstructed the story from the documents.

The second curiosity is a sundial. At number 63 of Piazza Martiri della Libertà there is a sundial with the inscription NARDI POSUIT, which Ercole Nardi installed in 1889: the same professor who four years earlier had surveyed the Roman villas of the territory. A village schoolmaster who measures time with the sun and catalogs the ruins of the senators: it is an image of Umbertine Italy worth a chapter of social history. When you see it, check the time on your phone. Usually Nardi is right.

Visiting Poggio Mirteto Place by Place

The historic center is made of two parts holding hands. Higher up and farther uphill is the Poggio Vecchio, the medieval core enclosed by the 14th-century walls and by Porta Farnese. Below, on a gentle descent, the modern town born around Piazza Martiri della Libertà, which from the 17th century onward shifted the center of gravity of the town downhill. You visit in this order: first the square and its churches, then the gate, then the old core up to Porta di Sotto, finally you go down to San Paolo and the glassworks. The two outlying churches, the Misericordia and San Valentino, and the hamlet of Castel San Pietro require a car.

Piazza Martiri della Libertà, the Drawing Room of Poggio Mirteto

The square is the social and commercial center of the town, and its shape tells a plan. The foundations date to 1610, when the community decided to give itself a public space outside the walls, on the ground that slopes down toward the rio Sole. Since then the buildings have gone up, a retaining wall was built toward the stream and in 1893 the road surface was leveled to obtain the present esplanade. It is oversized for a hill town, and that is the point: communities that are on the rise build beyond their own measure. Facing it are the cathedral and the church of San Rocco, the town hall, the cafés. At the center, the war memorial inaugurated on August 9, 1926 to a design by the architect Balestrieri. On the facades, a collection of plaques worth reading one by one: those to the fallen of the Risorgimento and of World War II, the one of June 10, 1984 that remembers the civilians killed by German shelling 40 years earlier, and at number 34 the plaque that remembers the hospitality given to a pregnant Anita Garibaldi in the house of a local family, when in July 1849 the Garibaldian column retreating from Rome camped here.

Then there is a macabre detail that no guidebook prints. At the spot where the newsstand is today, the death sentences of the Papal State were carried out, and the last execution, in 1844, was conducted by Giovanni Battista Bugatti, Mastro Titta, the famous executioner of Rome who kept a register of his executions. That the square of freedom was born on the scaffold is one of those ironies that the history of this town produces regularly. In our judgment the square is the place to stop first and last, in the morning for the market and in the evening for the aperitivo, because it is here that you see if a town is alive. Poggio Mirteto is.

The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Poggio Mirteto

The cathedral closes the square with a terracotta facade, sober and wide, that does not look for effect. The construction site was long. The sources place the start of the works around the middle of the 17th century, the blessing in 1684, the opening for worship in 1721 and the consecration on October 3, 1779 by Monsignor Contessini. The design is attributed to Martino Longhi the Younger, the Roman architect of Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio at the Trevi Fountain, who died in 1660. The attribution is traditional and should be taken as such, but the proportions of the interior, with three naves, with that Roman Baroque held in check by the means of a provincial community, are consistent with the Longhi environment. It was a church that was not supposed to exist: in a territory dominated by Farfa, equipping itself with an important mother church meant removing from abbey dependence baptisms, weddings, funerals, confraternities, that is, the whole social fabric of the community. In 1841, with the establishment of the diocese, it became a cathedral, and a cathedral it has remained even after the union with Sabina in 1925.

Inside, look at the 17th-century canvases: a Madonna enthroned with Child, a Passing of Saint Joseph, a Baptism of Christ. None is a textbook masterpiece, all look to Rome and belong to the season when provincial bishops and canons commissioned from Rome what they could afford. The light is the typical light of hill churches: it enters from few openings, cuts the space into bands and changes radically with the hour. In the morning the interior is bright and almost didactic. In the late afternoon it becomes deep, the side aisles darken, the altars emerge. If you can choose, choose the afternoon. And don't stop at the central nave: in churches like this the richest historical material is on the sides, in the patronage chapels, in the plaques, in the coats of arms, in the inscriptions that record donations and bequests. They are open-air documents: they tell which families counted and for what they wanted to be remembered. The cathedral opens at the times of services, which the parish publishes on smassunta.it. Outside those hours you ask in the sacristy or come back later, as always in smaller towns.

The Church of San Rocco

On the other side of the square, San Rocco is the church of the confraternity and of the plague, as everywhere in central Italy: the pilgrim saint healed from contagion and every community dedicated an oratory to him at the gates of the town. The present building, with Baroque-style lines, was completed in 1779, the same year as the consecration of the cathedral. Two construction sites that close together say that in the 1770s Poggio Mirteto had money and confidence. It is a small church, often closed, and it is worth above all for the facade that dialogues with that of the cathedral across the square. Seeing them together, at sunset, explains the Sabine 18th century better than a lecture.

Porta Farnese, the Threshold of Poggio Mirteto

From the square you climb a few meters and find yourself in front of Porta Farnese, the monumental access to the medieval core and, without exaggeration, one of the most eloquent architectural elements of Sabina. It was opened in 1576, in Renaissance forms later enriched in the Baroque era, in the years when Farfa Abbey and its lands were in commendam to the Farnese: the name says who was in charge. The house that from the 16th century left traces from the Duchy of Castro to Caprarola and to Roman commissions wanted whoever entered Poggio Mirteto to understand which system it belonged to. A gate named after a family is an act of communication: it says who protects you. What strikes you is the disproportion, ambitious for a center of this size, and that is exactly the point: whoever passed through here, merchant or pilgrim or official, understood they were entering the organizing center of a district, not a village.

It is worth passing through twice. The first time entering, by day, to see the structure, the materials, the way the masonry joins the houses leaning against the 14th-century walls. The second time leaving, toward sunset, when the raking light highlights every irregularity of the stone and the gate stops being a monument and goes back to what it has always been: the threshold between inside and outside, between the community and the countryside, between safety and risk. Around the gate the defensive logic is still easy to read: the houses on the walls, the alleys that narrow, the scarcity of openings on the lower levels. Whoever has an eye for these things will find here a lesson in urban planning clearer than in many villages restored with excessive zeal. Today the gate marks the border between the new town, which grew toward the square, and the Poggio Vecchio.

The Poggio Vecchio: Clock Tower, Sala Farnese, San Giovanni and the Bishop's Palace

Beyond the gate the fabric changes: narrow alleys, often stepped, buttress arches, stone portals with carved dates. The first building you meet is the Clock Tower, built in the middle of the 16th century in the same Farnese program as the gate. In the bell chamber it keeps the bells that came from the church of San Paolo, one of which has the date 1290 carved on it. They are among the oldest dated bronzes in the province, and the fact that they were moved from the old church to the civic tower tells of the passage of public time from the parish to the municipality. A little farther on, the former church of the Santissima Trinità, a deconsecrated 15th-century hall that today is called Sala Farnese and hosts exhibitions and conferences. It is the place where the municipality receives guests and where, on opening days, you can see the interior of a 15th-century Sabine church without the Baroque altars that elsewhere have covered it.

The church of San Giovanni Battista, also called San Giovanni Decollato, is the 17th-century monument of the old core: it was built by the architect Angelo Savi, a local figure about whom little is known, and the dedication to the beheaded Baptist points to the confraternities that assisted those condemned to death, a detail that, after the story of the scaffold in the square, no longer sounds like chance. Opposite, the Bishop's Palace, imposing for a town, built and enlarged when Poggio Mirteto became a diocese: a bishop had to have a worthy residence, and the canons a curia. Together with the 13th-century Palazzo Abbaziale, they are the three powers that governed the town gathered within a few dozen meters: the abbot, the municipality, the bishop. I know of no other village in Lazio where the sequence is so readable.

Porta di Sotto and the View of Monte Soratte

The medieval core ends on the opposite side with Porta di Sotto, the other access to the walls, from which opens the panorama that alone justifies the climb: the Tiber valley widening toward the west, the plain of Fiano and Passo Corese, and in the distance, isolated like an island of rock, Monte Soratte, the mountain of Horace and of Kesselring's bunker. On clear winter mornings you can see as far as the Cornicolani Mountains and the foothills of the Lucretili. On foggy mornings the valley floor disappears under a white blanket and the ridge towns emerge like islands. It is exactly the scene that determined settlement on these heights: people lived high up because down below there were damp, fog and, historically, malaria. From here, in autumn, you can also see the nets spread under the olive trees.

The Church of San Paolo, the Masterpiece of Poggio Mirteto

If there is one place in Poggio Mirteto worth organizing your day around, it is the church of San Paolo, outside the center, down along the street of the same name, next to the public park that bears its name. It is the oldest church in the town and for centuries it was the parish church and the cemetery church. It began as a simple rural chapel, became a hermitage around the year 1000 and was enlarged in the 13th century in the present Romanesque-Gothic forms, with a very simple facade adorned only by the portal in local stone and a modest rose window. The bell tower, halfway along the right side, has two orders of single and double lancet windows and has no bells: they are the ones that ended up in the Clock Tower, with the date 1290. The interior has a single nave, marked by four pointed arches, and is entirely frescoed with paintings ranging from the 13th to the 16th century. With the opening of the new cemetery in 1888 the church lost its function and began a long decline. The restorations of 2007-2009 and the FAI campaign that brought it among the Luoghi del Cuore have given it back its dignity.

The showpiece is the apse, frescoed in 1521 and attributed with good probability to the Torresani brothers, Veronese painters active in Sabina in the first decades of the 16th century (the sources waver between the two brothers and Lorenzo alone). At the top, Christ crowns Mary amid a choir of musician angels playing instruments of the period, reproduced with a precision that interests historians of music. Below, the Conversion of Saint Paul, with Saul fallen from his horse on the road to Damascus. On the triumphal arch, restored in 2007, King Solomon and the prophet Isaiah hold Latin scrolls that comment on the coronation. On the left wall is the most unusual scene in the church: the Crowned Knight, a 15th-century fresco in which a knight with a crown meditates before a decomposing corpse, accompanied by an inscription in Umbro-Sabine vernacular, one of the very rare written testimonies of that speech. It is a local variant of the theme of the meeting of the living and the dead, the memento mori that in Italy of the 14th and 15th centuries followed the plagues. Next to it, a Deposition in the sepulcher in Giottesque taste, also from the 15th century. The chapels of the Immaculate Conception and of the Virgin, the figures of saints and an Annunciation have become legible again with the restorations of 2008-2009, together with the traces of the penitential movement of the Bianchi of 1399, the procession of flagellants dressed in white that crossed central Italy in that year of fear and left their images painted in dozens of churches between Umbria and Sabina. A medallion finally records the restoration made at the expense of the population in 1749.

The church has no tourist hours: the parish of the cathedral, on which it depends, opens it for services, for guided visits and on FAI days. Those who care write or phone the parish before leaving, and allow for a second attempt. The judgment is clear: San Paolo is worth more than the cathedral, the gate and the square put together. If you have only one hour in Poggio Mirteto and the church is open, spend it there.

Piazza della Vetreria and the Chimney

Going down from San Paolo, or from the main square by Via San Paolo, you arrive in 150 meters at Piazza della Vetreria. Of the crystal factory of 1826 there remain the chimney and some buildings, converted into venues. It is the right place for an aperitivo and for a reflection: here, in a town of the Papal States, real industry was made for decades, with furnaces, workers, a market that reached Rome. When the factory closed, the working class it had formed remained, and made the revolt of 1861. Few chimneys in Italy have a similar political résumé.

The Sanctuary of the Madonna della Misericordia and the Convent of San Valentino

Outside the town, two places of devotion complete the religious picture. The sanctuary of the Madonna della Misericordia dates to the 18th century and remains the destination of the town processions. The parish celebrates Mass there in the afternoon, and that is the moment to find it open. The convent of San Valentino, in the countryside of the same name toward the Tiber, dates to the 14th century and stands in the area where Professor Nardi identified the two Roman villas, the one attributed to Varro and the Bagni di Lucilla: the friars built, as often happens, on top of the senators. Here too the Sunday Mass is the chance to go in. On the hill of San Cosimo, which dominates the town, the church of the same name is instead abandoned and can be seen from outside: it is a ruin with a view, and in spring the walk to reach it is one of the most beautiful in the territory.

The Museo Arti e Mestieri of Poggio Mirteto

The town also has an ethnographic museum, the Museo Arti e Mestieri, a permanent exhibition with more than 1,000 objects of traditional work and Sabine daily life: tools from the olive mill and the vineyard, looms, utensils of the trades that the ruins of workshops, mills and kilns scattered across the territory tell about in negative. It opens on weekends and holidays. It is best to check the hours on the municipality's website before counting on it. For those who come with children it is the stop that holds together stones and people.

Castel San Pietro, the Island of Poggio Mirteto

The hamlet of Castel San Pietro is an administrative curiosity and a small masterpiece of landscape. It is an island: its territory is surrounded by the municipalities of Salisano and Montopoli di Sabina and does not touch the rest of Poggio Mirteto, to which it belongs through feudal events. The village stands, according to tradition, on the remains of a Roman villa attributed to Diocletian. In 1449 the Apostolic Chamber sold it to the Orsini, and several changes of hands followed until 1706, when Clement XI authorized its transfer to other owners. The castle, documented from the early 11th century and known as Castello Pinci from the name of the last family, has 16th-century forms with alterations from every era and has recently been restored. It is visited by appointment. Around it, in Piazza Grande, the park with a monumental yew said to be 500 years old, the church of San Pietro with an altarpiece between the 17th and 18th centuries, the Porta Romana of the 13th-14th century and, in the countryside, the rural church of San Sebastiano from the 11th century. The village is always accessible, and the view over the valley, from the esplanade, is the most beautiful in the whole municipality.

Poggio Mirteto Scalo, the Other Town

Finally the Scalo, the hamlet along the Tiber born around the station of the Roma-Orte line. It has a modern church dedicated to the Holy Family, shops, schools, the Capacqua industrial zone, and a population by now comparable to that of the center. It also has a story that few people know: on September 19, 1943, at its station, the partisans Redento Masci, Eugenio Meneghini and Giorgio Labò sabotaged two German freight trains and Mussolini's private train standing on the tracks. A photograph taken that day from Torrita Tiberina shows the column of smoke rising from the valley. Labò was the explosives expert of the clandestine powder store in Via Giulia, in Rome. It is worth a stop, before climbing back up.

One Thing Nobody Tells You About Poggio Mirteto (RI)

We come to the part I write most gladly, the one where I put the things that never appear in official presentations. Not because they are secret, but because they are inconvenient, or not very flattering, or not spectacular enough for a brochure. They are, however, pieces of information that change the way you set up the visit.

Poggio Mirteto Is Two Towns, and You Have to Decide Which One You Are Visiting

There are two Poggio Mirtetos, separated by eight kilometers and by 150 years, with identities that have drifted apart. There is the historic town on the ridge, with Porta Farnese, the cathedral, the alleys, the square. And there is Poggio Mirteto Scalo, along the Tiber, born around the station of the Roma-Orte railway inaugurated in 1865 and grown in the 20th century with the opposite logic. It is not a topographical detail. It is the deep structure of this place. The Scalo today has a remarkable demographic and economic weight, it has commerce, services, a parish, an industrial zone, a life of its own. Many people who say they are from Poggio Mirteto mean the Scalo. The duality is so marked that whoever arrives without knowing it can spend a whole afternoon on the valley floor convinced of having visited the town, and leave with no idea of what they missed.

The reason is the railway, and the railway in Poggio Mirteto has a particular story, because according to local tradition it was the reward offered to the town for the revolt of 1861. The commissioner Pepoli supposedly had the line pass closer to the town, and the population supposedly preferred another reward, the permission to hold carnival in Lent. When the line arrived, for the first time a reason was created to live down below. Before, people lived up high out of defensive and health necessity. Afterward, they live down below for convenience. It is the same process that has split dozens of Italian towns into a historic name and a hamlet called Scalo, Stazione or Marina, with the same result: the demographic center of gravity goes down, the historic center keeps the symbolic and administrative functions and loses inhabitants. The practical consequence is twofold. If you arrive by train, you have to plan the transfer and not take it for granted. If you arrive by car and set the navigator to Poggio Mirteto without specifying, you might find yourself at the Scalo, so check the destination. The cultural consequence is more interesting: in a few kilometers you pass from a medieval and modern fabric, dense, vertical, designed for defense and community life, to a 20th-century fabric that is horizontal, dispersed, organized around mobility. They are two opposite ways of inhabiting the same territory. It is worth looking at both, knowing that they tell two successive chapters of the same story.

Poggio Mirteto Has a War History That the Guidebooks Skip

The second thing nobody says is that this smiling town paid for the Resistance and the war more than almost any other center in Lazio, and that the plaques in the square are only the index. On October 23, 1943 Mario Dottori, a young man from the town, died along the railway in the Galantina stream covering the retreat of 21 comrades of the brigade who were carrying three crates of TNT. He was the first victim of the local resistance and a square is named after him. On April 7, 1944 the roundup on Monte Tancia, planned by the Republican chief of Rieti and carried out by an SS police battalion with the support of the Republican National Guard, cost the lives of six partisans in the battle of the Arcucciola, above Salisano, and the same evening of 18 civilians, women and children included, in the Tancia massacre at Monte San Giovanni. On April 9 four people arrested in Poggio Mirteto during the roundup, among them the podestà Giuseppe De Vito, who collaborated with the partisans, and an 18-year-old worker, were shot at the Fosse Reatine. And on June 10, 1944, with the Allies already in Rome, the retreating Germans invited the starving population to take foodstuffs in the historic center. When the people were trapped, a unit posted at Colle Pulcino, above Montopoli, shelled the town, killing 15 people, among them a nine-year-old child and a 14-year-old boy. The plaque in Piazza Martiri della Libertà bears the names. Since 1980 a Partisan Marathon has climbed every year from the square to the Arcucciola, and the local ANPI, named after Dottori, has built a diffuse museum of the Resistance in Sabina. Those who come here for the carnival should know this too: the cheerful anticlericalism of the Sunday of Lent and the memory of June 1944 are the same civic culture.

Oil Is Not a Souvenir: It Is the Most Serious Thing in Poggio Mirteto

In tourist presentations Sabina DOP oil appears in a list that puts it on the same level as cheese, honey and cookies. The equation is misleading. In Sabina oil is not a product. It is the product, the activity that built the landscape, determined the structure of property, marked the calendar and made the wealth and poverty of families for generations. Sabina was among the first Italian territories to obtain the protected designation of origin for extra virgin oil, with the Community recognition of EC Regulation 1263 of July 10, 1996, and Poggio Mirteto falls within the production zone, which covers 35 municipalities of the province of Rieti and 13 of the Metropolitan City of Rome. The production specification sets a maximum acidity of 0.6 grams per 100 grams and describes a yellow-green oil with golden shades, fruity, velvety, with a clear bitterness and pungency in very fresh oils. Here the historic cultivar is the Carboncella, prized and now in crisis. Alongside it there are Leccino, Frantoio, Raja and the other varieties of the specification. Those used to industrial oils find this aggressiveness bewildering the first time and indispensable by the third. The right moment is autumn, from late October to December: the mills work at full capacity and the air of the towns has that smell of pomace and new oil that is one of the strongest sensory experiences of rural Italy. Buy from the producer or the mill, ask for the vintage, and don't expect it to be cheap: an extra virgin picked by hand and milled within a few hours has a production cost that doesn't allow supermarket prices. And remember that the Sabine olive grove is a landscape at risk: century-old trees require maintenance, harvesting on slopes can hardly be mechanized, generational turnover is difficult. Every bottle bought here keeps standing a piece of the panorama you came to photograph.

Sabina Is Not Umbria, and That Is Its Good Fortune

One last thing, and perhaps the most important, because it concerns expectations. Those who visit Sabina often arrive with Umbria in mind: perfect villages, widespread hospitality, farm stays, wine bars, well-kept signage. Sabina is not that. The accommodation offer is sparser, information is less organized, hours are less predictable, places are not packaged as experiences. A tourist used to Umbrian or Tuscan standards experiences it as a shortcoming. In reality it is a different condition and in some ways preferable, but you have to know what you are entering. The advantage is that there is no saturation: there are no lines, you don't pay the surcharge of a famous destination, on a weekday you are often the only visitor, people have time, conversations are real. The disadvantage is that you have to work harder: check, phone, allow for something being closed. You have to, in a word, travel instead of consume. There is also a mirror risk: the closeness to Rome, commuting and remote work are bringing to Sabina people who buy a house and stay. It is a phenomenon that counters depopulation, but risks turning the towns into dormitory neighborhoods. Poggio Mirteto, with its history of autonomy and its strong social structure, probably has the antibodies to handle it better than others. It is an open match, and it is being played now.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting Poggio Mirteto (RI)

The main advice is just one and I put it right away: don't treat Poggio Mirteto as a stop. The temptation, for those traveling in Sabina, is to consider it the functional pause on the road to Farfa, the place where you park, have a coffee and leave again. It is the wrong way to use it. Poggio Mirteto should be used as a base. It has the size, the services and the position to work as the center of gravity of a day or a weekend in Sabina: from here you reach in very short times almost all the places worth a visit, and in the evening you return to a place with open bars, people in the street and a life of its own.

The second piece of advice concerns pace. This is a town without a magnet monument able to organize the visit in your place, with the exception of San Paolo, which is often closed. The value is in the sum of the details and in the perception of the whole, and this requires a way of walking different from that of art cities. You have to wander aimlessly for at least half an hour, letting the town declare itself, and only afterward look for the things you had read about. Whoever arrives with the list in hand and ticks it off in 40 minutes will leave convinced there was nothing to see, and will be wrong.

Third, very practical: come in the morning and on a weekday. Poggio Mirteto is a working town, and its functions are carried out at the hours when offices are open, shops are working and people circulate. On a holiday afternoon the center is beautiful and empty, which has its charm but returns half the truth. On any Tuesday morning you see a social organism in motion, and this is the thing that you do not easily find elsewhere in inland Lazio. If you are looking for San Paolo, instead, write to the parish first: an hour in that church is worth the day.

Fourth, on food. Sabina has a poor cuisine in the noble sense: few ingredients, much technique, a close relationship with seasonality. Oil is the absolute protagonist and should be tasted consciously, on bread, not used as a distracted condiment. Sheep cheeses have a tradition as old as Apennine pastoralism: the cacio magno, a soft pecorino, bears a name that tradition links to Charlemagne, who supposedly tasted it at Farfa Abbey. It is a legend, but the cheese is real. Handmade pastas, legumes, farmyard meats, wild greens picked when it is their moment, the anise ring cakes distributed on January 17, for Saint Anthony Abbot, at the blessing of the animals: it is a repertoire that rewards those who rely on the owner instead of ordering what they would order at home. The right question, on entering a trattoria, is not what do you have that is typical, but what do you have that is fresh today.

Fifth, on combining the stops. With a whole day, the strongest pairing is Poggio Mirteto in the morning and Farfa Abbey in the afternoon. The reason is narrative before it is logistical: you spend the morning in a town whose identity was built on claiming autonomy from that abbey, and in the afternoon you go see the abbey. The visit gains a depth it would not have if the stops were reversed. The village of Farfa around the monastery, with the arcaded street and the workshops, closes the day. Those who want the English version will find the ItalyPlanner guide to Farfa Abbey. With two days I add the loop of Fara in Sabina for the viewpoint, Toffia for its medieval compactness and Castelnuovo di Farfa for the oil theme handled in a didactic way. With three, you go up toward the mountain with Roccantica and Poggio Catino, or go down north toward Montebuono and Torri in Sabina, and you cannot ignore Casperia, perhaps the most photographed village in Sabina. Those traveling in a group, with a company or with particular needs are quicker to have the itinerary built by those who do it for a living: the custom private experiences of TourLeaderPro start from Rome and also cover Sabina.

Sixth, on shoes and pace. The historic center is on a slope, the paving is uneven, some alleys are stepped. You don't need trekking gear, but smooth soles are a very bad idea after rain. Those with walking difficulties enjoy the square and the area around it, which are flat, and give up the alleys of the Poggio Vecchio without losing the essential. Seventh, perhaps the most important: talk to someone. Here people answer. There is not the wariness of saturated places nor the hospitality performance of villages that live on tourism. The bartender, the shopkeeper, the person sitting in the square are the best source for knowing when the market is, where to eat well, if the cathedral is open. Eighth, a mental invitation: look up and look far. Up, because the facades keep coats of arms, dated lintels, walled-up windows, traces of remodeling that tell the building history better than a sign. Far, because the real heritage of Poggio Mirteto, the one no restoration can ruin, is the view over the Tiber valley with Soratte in the distance and the Sabine Mountains behind you. You look in silence for a few minutes and it stays in memory much longer than a fresco.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Rarely Mentioned

That Poggio Mirteto staged a revolt in 1861 everyone in Sabina knows. That the revolt began over a beheading, few say, and even fewer explain why the date matters. You have to remember the political geography of that winter. In September 1860 the Piedmontese army had occupied Umbria and the Marche, and with Umbria the delegation of Rieti: upper Sabina was already Italy. Poggio Mirteto had remained papal, the last strip of the Papal States wedged between the Tiber and a new border that ran a few kilometers away. In that situation, in the first weeks of 1861 (local sources give January 24, others February 24), the execution of a subject of the pope set off a popular revolt: the inhabitants drove out the papal authorities and proclaimed themselves liberated, without waiting for any army. On February 27 a delegation of glassworks workers formally asked the marquis Gioacchino Napoleone Pepoli, general commissioner for Umbria, for annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, which would be proclaimed on March 17. It is one of the very few cases in which a town of the Papal States freed itself, before and without Garibaldi.

The sequel is the part that gets told gladly. Pepoli, grateful, supposedly had the new Pio Centrale railway, the Roma-Orte inaugurated in 1865, pass closer to the town. The population, according to tradition, asked in exchange for something else: authorization to celebrate carnival on the first Sunday of Lent, that is, when the Church forbids it. The gift of the railway arrived all the same, and it produced the Scalo. The carnival permission produced the Carnevalone Liberato. A well-known fact, then, but with three consequences that almost nobody lines up: a split town, a festival unique in Italy and a telephone area code, 0765, which is still called the Poggio Mirteto district today and covers municipalities of two provinces, the last echo of when the magistrate's court, the court and all the functions of a small provincial capital were here. The court was abolished in 2012. The area code endures.

The Carnevalone Liberato of Poggio Mirteto

We come to the showpiece, the one for which it is worth writing a whole page on Poggio Mirteto. The Carnevalone Liberato is a street festival that resembles no other Italian carnival, for a precise reason: it is not a festival of masks, it is a political festival disguised as carnival, and it is held on the first Sunday of Lent, that is, at a time when carnival, canonically, should no longer exist. It is a carnival out of place, and the overrun is exactly the message: the community keeps celebrating when the ecclesiastical authority has decided it is time to stop. There is no more elegant way to say that you have emancipated yourself. The adjective Liberato is not decorative: it refers to the liberation of 1861 from the Papal State, and the festival was born with the population's request to celebrate every year its own self-liberation.

The History of the Carnevalone Liberato: 1861, 1929, 1977

For almost 70 years the festival was held with its sacrilegious and satirical character, targeting fashion, the notables and the events of the town and the Kingdom with papier-mâché masks and puppets. Then came fascism. With the signing of the Lateran Pacts of 1929 and the policy of alliance with the Vatican, the regime suppressed it, or rather brought it back to the canonical dates before Lent, which amounted to emptying it of meaning. Local sources place the move as early as 1926. The event declined. It was restored in 1977, in the climate of those years, by the ARCI Circle of Poggio Mirteto, which still organizes it today, and it has kept its anticlerical character entire: the symbol is the trident on red flags, the lunch in the square is meat-based in open violation of the Lenten fast, and every year a satirical poster targets a figure of national politics. In 2007 Giorgia Meloni, then vice president of the Chamber, filed a parliamentary question against the festival, which came to nothing. In 2024 the poster took aim at her. The Carnevalone gives no discounts to anyone, and this consistency is its strength.

Bammoccio, Pantasima and the Procession of the Moccoletti

The day has its rites. The Bammoccio is the big papier-mâché puppet representing the target of the year and is carried in procession through the town to Piazza Martiri della Libertà. The Pantasima is a dancing effigy, a gigantic female figure moved by a dancing bearer, borrowed from the August festivals of Sabine tradition. At the end, after the satire, the songs and the lunch, both are burned in the square, and the day closes with the Procession of the Moccoletti, the parody with lit candles of a religious procession. The public comes from all over Lazio and from Umbria, and in recent editions has exceeded 10,000 attendees. It is not a costume reenactment with extras reading a script: it is a community that organizes itself, builds, writes texts on current events and takes over the square. Those who arrive expecting Viareggio will be thrown off. Those who want to understand how a town processes its collective memory will find something to sink their teeth into.

The Carnevalone Poggiano and the Sagra della Bruschetta

Then there is the other carnival, and confusion between the two is frequent. The Carnevalone Poggiano is the calendar carnival, the one of the last Sunday before Lent. It was instituted in 1862, the year after the liberation, and has passed 160 editions. It has allegorical floats, decorated vehicles, masked groups, a children's carnival, and culminates with the reading of the will and the cremation of an effigy called His Majesty Carnevalone. The first written record of a carnival in Poggio Mirteto dates to February 1579, and the term Carnevalone, for the big puppet burned in the square, appears precisely in 1861. With the Carnevalone Poggiano the Sagra della Bruschetta is held, where toasted bread is dressed with new Sabina DOP oil: it is the simplest and most right way to taste the territory. Two Sundays, then, one or two weeks apart: the first traditional and family-oriented, the second political and irreverent. The dates depend on Easter and must be checked every year on the municipality's website or on the channels of the ARCI Circle.

One thing must be said clearly: on a Carnevalone day the historic center is impracticable for a contemplative visit. Parking near the center is impossible, the connections from the Scalo are overloaded, the cathedral can't be visited calmly. Whoever wants to see the town in tranquility chooses another day. Whoever wants to see it be itself in the most intense way comes that day. The suggestion is to come twice: on any weekday for the architecture and the landscape, and at the festival for the people.

The Right Photo to Take in Poggio Mirteto (RI)

Every town has a photograph that defines it, and almost always it is not the one you take first. In Poggio Mirteto the photo everyone takes is Porta Farnese head-on, in full light, with the arch framing the alley. It is a beautiful image, it works, and nobody should give it up. But it is not the right photo, because it tells a monument, not the town. The right photo is made by moving: you have to leave the center and look for one of the points where the road to the Scalo or the one to Castel San Pietro opens onto the slope, so as to have the town in profile in front of you and the emptiness of the valley behind. From there you see Poggio Mirteto for what it is: a compact settlement stretched along the ridge, with the cathedral bell tower and the Clock Tower emerging from the roofs, the band of olive groves that climbs up to meet it from below, and in the background Monte Tancia. It is a photograph that contains three elements in a single frame: the settlement, the cultivation that made it possible, the landscape that determined it.

Light is the decisive factor. The two best hours are first thing in the morning and the last before sunset. Early in the morning, in autumn and winter, the Tiber valley fills with low fog: the valley floor disappears and the ridge towns emerge like islands. Anyone who manages to be at Porta di Sotto at that moment takes home an image worth the trip, because it is the scene that determined human settlement on these heights. The evening is a different photograph: the raking light brings out the color of the stones, the olive groves turn bright silver, the long shadows shape the terraces, making visible a geometry that is flat at noon. If I had to choose a single outing, I would choose a late November afternoon, with the nets spread under the trees. A technical warning: an extreme wide angle doesn't work here, it pushes the mountains away and flattens the distances. A normal lens or a light telephoto is better, which compresses the planes and gives back the layering of town, olive groves, valley and mountains. With a phone, use the optical zoom if there is one, never the digital.

Inside the historic center the photographs are of another kind. The alleys of the Poggio Vecchio shot from above give the funnel perspective typical of ridge villages: the houses close in, the paving tilts, at the end a sliver of valley appears. Even better if a human figure enters the frame and gives scale. Details abound because the town was not restored uniformly: lintels with carved dates, coats of arms above portals, walled-up windows, brackets and small arches surfacing from recent plaster. Photographing them systematically builds a small archive of the building history of the town. The cathedral poses the classic problem of churches on squares: the terracotta facade shoots well only from the opposite side of the square, in the morning, when the sun hits it. In the afternoon it is in shadow. At San Paolo, if it's open, you shoot without flash, and the subject is the apse with the musician angels, which requires a long exposure and a support. During the Carnevalone the register becomes reportage, and a rule of behavior applies before one of technique: the wide shot poses no problems, the close portrait of a stranger asks for a look of understanding. In the towns of Sabina people are helpful, often amused, almost never hostile. Just don't behave as if you were photographing an exotic phenomenon. It is a community doing something it has done for generations.

One last idea for those who want to step out of the pattern. The most unusual photograph is made at the Scalo: the FL1 station, the tracks cutting across the valley floor and, high in the background, the profile of the town on the ridge. In a single image there are the two times of this territory, the long one of the medieval settlement and the short one of the railway that since 1865 has reshuffled the cards. It is a conceptual photograph, less beautiful than the others, but it is the one worth keeping.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

Here are the dates that matter in a row, because the history of Poggio Mirteto is better understood as a sequence than as a story. In 1290 the bell of San Paolo, which now rings from the Clock Tower, is cast, the oldest dated evidence in the town. Between 1285 and 1300 the abbot of Farfa has the Palazzo Abbaziale built, seat of monastic government over the castle founded a few decades earlier. In 1399 the procession of the Bianchi crosses Sabina and leaves its images on the walls of San Paolo. In 1449 the Apostolic Chamber sells Castel San Pietro to the Orsini. In 1521 the Torresani fresco the apse of San Paolo. In February 1579 a document records for the first time the carnival of the town. In 1576 the Farnese open the gate that bears their name. In 1610 the foundations of the square are laid. In 1749 the population pays out of its own pocket for the restoration of San Paolo. In 1779 the cathedral is consecrated and San Rocco is completed. In 1801 the mosaic of Diana of Ephesus comes out of the fields of San Valentino, today in the Vatican. In 1826 the glassworks opens. In 1837 Gregory XVI grants the title of city. In 1841 the diocese is born. In 1844 Mastro Titta carries out in the square the last capital sentence.

Then the century accelerates. On July 6, 1849 Garibaldi, retreating from Rome with about 4,000 men and with Anita, camps at Poggio Mirteto. In the winter of 1861 the town frees itself from papal government and on February 27 asks for annexation to Italy. 1862 sees the first edition of the Carnevalone Poggiano. In 1865 the Roma-Orte railway arrives and the Scalo is born. In 1867 the town's brass band follows the Garibaldians in the Agro Romano campaign, the one of Monterotondo and Mentana. A century later, in 1967, it will earn the title of Banda Nazionale Garibaldina. In 1888 the new cemetery opens and San Paolo loses its function. In 1889 Nardi installs the sundial in the square. In 1893 the square is leveled. In 1925 the diocese merges with Sabina. In 1926 the war memorial is inaugurated and, with the Lateran Pacts of 1929, the Carnevalone Liberato is suppressed. On September 19, 1943 the partisans sabotage the German trains at the Scalo. On October 23 Mario Dottori dies. On April 7 and 9, 1944 come the roundup of Tancia and the shootings at the Fosse Reatine. On June 10, 1944 the shelling of the historic center with 15 dead. In 1977 the Carnevalone Liberato is reborn. In 1980 the first Partisan Marathon starts. In 1993 John Paul II visits the cathedral. In 2012 two legislative decrees abolish the court, closing a chapter of administrative centrality that lasted centuries. The event to tell first remains that of 1861: a town of 6,000 souls that drives out on its own a government 1,000 years old and, as a prize, asks to be allowed to laugh in Lent.

Who Has Passed Through Poggio Mirteto (RI)

A town like this has no gallery of celebrities to show off, but it has more documented passages than you would believe, and some are surprising. Let's begin with the oldest, with the necessary caution. Marcus Terentius Varro, the greatest scholar of republican Rome, born in Rieti, is the name that 19th-century tradition attached to the villa of the Casoni at San Valentino: possible, because the Varrones had lands in Sabina, not proven. The villa of the Bagni di Lucilla bears the name of a woman of the imperial family, and Castel San Pietro supposedly stands on a villa of Diocletian. These are the attributions with which local erudition ennobled its own ruins, and they should be read as such. Documented, instead, are the monks of Farfa, who from the 13th century administered the castle from their palace, and the Farnese, who in the 16th century left the gate and the tower here.

The most famous passage is that of Giuseppe Garibaldi. On July 6, 1849, having left Rome after the fall of the Republic with the column of about 4,000 volunteers trying to reach Venice, he stopped at Poggio Mirteto. With him was Anita, pregnant, whom a family of the town hosted in the house at number 34 of Piazza Martiri della Libertà, where a plaque remembers it. Anita would die a month later in the valleys of Comacchio. In 1867, 18 years later, the Poggio Mirteto brass band followed the Garibaldians in the Agro Romano campaign that ended at Mentana. For this reason it is still called the Banda Nazionale Garibaldina today and counts 45 members. In 1861 Gioacchino Napoleone Pepoli passed through, the Bolognese marquis and king's commissioner for Umbria, who received the delegation of workers and, according to tradition, had the railway diverted. In 1844 Mastro Titta, the executioner of Rome, had passed through, for a job that did him no honor.

Then come the scholars and travelers. Giuseppe Marocco in 1833 described the town and its glassworks in the Monuments of the Papal State. Antonio Nibby, the great topographer of Roman Italy, included it in 1844 in his Itinerary of Rome and Its Surroundings. Ercole Nardi, who was from here, surveyed the Roman villas in 1885 and left the sundial in 1889. The draftsmen and painters of northern Europe on the Grand Tour who settled in Rome made excursions into the countryside hunting for the ideal landscape with ruins, shepherds and twisted trees, and the Sabine Mountains entered that repertoire, though never with the fame of the Castelli Romani or Tivoli. In the 20th century came the engineers and railway workers, the partisans of the brigade who in September 1943 blew up two German freight trains and Mussolini's private train at the Scalo, and on June 10, 1944 the German troops retreating north, with the trail of death already described. In 1993 John Paul II came to visit the cathedral of the smallest of the suburbicarian sees. And in 2007 a parliamentary question by Giorgia Meloni brought the Carnevalone for a day to the national newspapers: the festival replied in its own way, 17 years later.

Finally there are the nameless passages, the ones that explain the most. The administrator monks with their registers, thanks to which the archive of Farfa is one of the most extraordinary monastic archives in Europe. The merchants who climbed up from the valley floor for the market. The shepherds of the transhumance, to whom we owe the pecorino and the vocabulary. The pilgrims who came down from Umbria toward Rome through the Tiber valley, an alternative route to the classic Francigena, with Farfa as a stage. The emigrants of the 20th century, toward America, toward Rome, toward the north. And today the FL1 commuters, every morning, every evening: the largest category and the least romantic, but the one that keeps the territory alive. A town is not made by the famous people who brushed past it. It is made by the anonymous people, by the thousands, who passed through it, left something there, and moved on.

What to See Around Poggio Mirteto Within Half an Hour

Sabina should be read as a system of towns that look at each other from one slope to another, and from Poggio Mirteto you see the profiles of the other centers perched on their respective hills, each with a variation on the theme. Farfa Abbey, a quarter of an hour away, is the stop that explains all the rest, with the library, the Carolingian church and the arcaded village. Fara in Sabina, on the hill above the abbey, has the widest viewpoint in the area and the civic archaeological museum. Toffia is the intact medieval village, with tower-houses overhanging the drop. Castelnuovo di Farfa has made a museum of oil. Bocchignano and Montebuono guard the northern band toward Umbria, Torri in Sabina holds the abbey of Santa Maria in Vescovio, the ancient cathedral of Sabina. Toward the mountain, Poggio Catino with the pentagonal tower under the cliff, Roccantica and Casperia, the entirely pedestrian village. Toward the river, the Tevere-Farfa reserve with its bird hides and, on the other bank, Monte Soratte. It is 40 minutes to Rieti, with the Franciscan Valle Santa, for which there is also an English guide on ItalyPlanner. They are variations on the same theme, and understanding one helps understand them all. But Poggio Mirteto, among these, has something the others don't: the urban dimension. It is a town that has been a city, and it shows.

Poggio Mirteto with Children and with Those Who Walk Little

Poggio Mirteto with Children

With children Poggio Mirteto works better than many postcard villages, because it has space: the big square to run in, the San Paolo park with the summer cinema arena, the stepped alleys of the Poggio Vecchio that for a child are a labyrinth, the glassworks chimney to guess what it was for, the sundial to read the time on. The Museo Arti e Mestieri, on weekends, shows tools that children can recognize and touch with their eyes. At Castel San Pietro there is the 500-year-old yew to hug. The Carnevalone Poggiano has a dedicated children's carnival. The Liberato is an adult festival, loud and satirical, and with little ones I would avoid it. In autumn a visit to an olive mill, asked for politely, is worth a science lesson.

Accessibility in Poggio Mirteto

Piazza Martiri della Libertà, the cathedral and San Rocco are on the flat and accessible by wheelchair, with some care for the entrance steps of the churches. Beyond Porta Farnese the medieval core is uphill, with uneven paving and stepped stretches: passable only with a companion and with effort. San Paolo can be reached by car and has a level entrance, but the forecourt is unpaved. Castel San Pietro has a flat forecourt. The Scalo is flat. Those who walk little can organize like this: square, cathedral, a stretch of the ring road for the panorama, San Paolo by car, and the rest is looked at from below.

Quick Questions About Poggio Mirteto (RI)

How Far Is Poggio Mirteto from Rome?

About 55-65 kilometers depending on the route: A1 to Fiano Romano and then SS 313, or via Tiberina. By car between 50 minutes and an hour and a quarter depending on traffic. By train with the FL1 from Roma Tiburtina about an hour to Poggio Mirteto Scalo, plus the transfer to the center.

How Much Does It Cost to Visit Poggio Mirteto?

Nothing. The churches have free entrance, the square and the historic center are open, Castel San Pietro is always accessible. You only pay for the train, any parking where indicated, and lunch.

How Much Time Do You Need for Poggio Mirteto?

Two or three hours for the historic center. Half a day with San Paolo. A whole day with Castel San Pietro, the Scalo and Farfa.

Is the Poggio Mirteto Station in the Town?

No. The FL1 station is at Poggio Mirteto Scalo, on the valley floor, about eight kilometers and about 100 meters of elevation difference from the historic center. You go up with the municipal city buses, on weekdays, or by taxi.

Where Do You Park in Poggio Mirteto?

Along the ring road and in the parking areas around Piazza Martiri della Libertà. The core beyond Porta Farnese is not tackled by car. On carnival and festival days parking near the center is impossible.

When Is the Carnevalone Liberato of Poggio Mirteto Held?

On the first Sunday of Lent, so between February and March depending on the date of Easter. The exact date is found every year on the channels of the municipality and of the ARCI Circle that organizes it.

What Is the Difference Between the Carnevalone Liberato and the Carnevalone Poggiano?

The Poggiano is the traditional carnival, the last Sunday before Lent, with floats, masks, the burning of His Majesty Carnevalone and the Sagra della Bruschetta. It dates from 1862. The Liberato is the anticlerical festival of the first Sunday of Lent, which remembers the liberation of 1861 from the Papal State, with the Bammoccio, the Pantasima and the Procession of the Moccoletti. Suppressed in 1929, it returned in 1977.

Why Does Poggio Mirteto Have a Cathedral?

Because from 1841 to 1925 it was the seat of an autonomous diocese. Today it is part of the suburbicarian see of Sabina-Poggio Mirteto, led by a cardinal, and the church of the Assunta keeps the title of cathedral.

Is the Cathedral of Poggio Mirteto Always Open?

It opens for Mass, on weekdays at 7:30 and in the late afternoon, on holidays from 8:00 until the evening. The updated hours are on the parish website, smassunta.it. Outside those slots it may be closed.

How Do You Visit the Church of San Paolo in Poggio Mirteto?

It depends on the parish of the cathedral, which opens it for services, guided visits and FAI days. It is best to contact the parish before the visit. It is the church with the Torresani frescoes of 1521 and the Crowned Knight with the inscription in Sabine vernacular.

What Is Porta Farnese in Poggio Mirteto?

The monumental entrance to the medieval core, opened in 1576 when the town and Farfa Abbey were in commendam to the Farnese. Renaissance with Baroque additions.

What Was the Poggio Mirteto Glassworks?

A factory of crystal and glass plates founded in 1826, considered the first of its kind in Italy. The chimney remains in Piazza della Vetreria. Its workers were protagonists of the request for annexation to Italy in 1861.

What Happened in Poggio Mirteto in 1861?

A popular revolt drove out the papal authorities while the rest of Sabina was already Italian. On February 27 a delegation asked Commissioner Pepoli for annexation. From that liberation the Carnevalone Liberato was born.

Did Garibaldi Pass Through Poggio Mirteto?

Yes, on July 6, 1849, retreating from Rome with about 4,000 men and with Anita, who was hosted in a house in Piazza Martiri della Libertà remembered by a plaque.

Is Poggio Mirteto Suitable for Children?

Yes: big square, San Paolo park, labyrinth alleys, trades museum on weekends, children's carnival. The Carnevalone Liberato, however, is an adult festival.

Can You Visit Poggio Mirteto in a Wheelchair?

The square, the cathedral, San Rocco, the panoramic ring road and the Scalo yes. The medieval core beyond Porta Farnese is uphill and stepped, difficult.

What Do You Eat in Poggio Mirteto?

Sabina DOP oil on bread, pecorino cheeses and cacio magno, handmade pastas, legumes, farmyard meats, anise ring cakes in January. Bruschetta with new oil at the carnival festival is the signature dish.

When Is the Best Time for Poggio Mirteto?

Spring for colors and walks, autumn for new oil and the mills, late winter for the two carnivals, July for the Italian cinema festival in the San Paolo park. Always on a weekday, in the morning.

What Is Castel San Pietro of Poggio Mirteto?

A hamlet that is an administrative island, with the Pinci castle in 16th-century forms visitable by appointment, a 500-year-old yew, the medieval Porta Romana and a great panorama over the valley.

Poggio Mirteto or Casperia: Which to Choose?

Casperia for the postcard, with the perfect pedestrian village. Poggio Mirteto for real life, services, San Paolo, the story of 1861 and as a base for all of Sabina. If you can, both on the same day: they are 20 minutes apart.

Can You Visit Poggio Mirteto and Farfa Together?

Yes, and it is the best pairing: Poggio Mirteto in the morning, the abbey in the afternoon, a quarter of an hour away by car.

Do You Need a Guide to Visit Poggio Mirteto?

For the town no, this page and the willingness to ask are enough. For a day organized among several villages, with a group or with particular needs, a professional tour leader makes the difference: TourLeaderPro organizes private and corporate tours in Sabina too.

Why I Go Back to Poggio Mirteto

It is not the most beautiful village in Sabina, and I say it without a problem: Casperia and Toffia are more photogenic, Farfa is more important. But it is the town that, in the whole province, has the most coherent history: four castles that merge, an abbey to emancipate from, a glassworks among the olive trees, a revolt made alone and a carnival that for 160 years has laughed at Lent. The right way to cross it is that of the guest, not the customer. Climb up to Porta Farnese, pass through it, reach the square, sit down and stay still for 20 minutes. Poggio Mirteto does not hand itself over in a hurry. But if you give it time, you notice.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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