In June 1155, this small town in the southern part of the Tuscia area of Viterbo along the consular Via Cassia, was the site of the dramatic meeting between Pope Hadrian IV and Frederic Barbarossa. The emperor failed to offer the pope stirrups (meaning that he did not help the pontiff off his horse) and in response, Hadrian IV refused to give him the kiss of peace. Five centuries later, on 18th September 1649 again in Monterosi, Cristoforo Giarda, the new bishop of Castro, was murdered by Ranuccio Farnese's paid assassins while he was heading towards the capital of the duchy to take over the diocese. This episode unleashed the fury of pope Innocent X, who ordered the Farnese city of Castro to be destroyed. The town, which is near a small volcanic lake in the Sabatini mountains - Lake Monterosi, covering only three square kilometres - has the Cardinal's Palace (formerly the residence of Alexander Farnese, nephew of Paul III), the seventeenth-century church of San Giuseppe (a highly original building because of its Oriental shape with an octagonal dome) and the coeval parish church of Santa Croce, which safeguards the relics of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, the patron saints of Monterorosi.