It lies in the south-eastern part of the Tuscia area of
Viterbo. The historic centre contains the Orsini castle, with a square
plan and cylindrical corner towers, built in the sixteenth century over a
pre-existing medieval construction. Giulia Farnese and Lucrezia Borgia stayed
here.
The Romanesque church or Santa Maria Assunta,
nestled against the castle walls, has an original feature in the shape of a
facade preceded by an asymmetrical porch of the eleventh century, supported by
two columns. One of the towers of the boundary wall is used as a belfry. The
interior has a nave and two aisles and contains frescoes of the thirteenth
century, a tabernacle of the sixteenth century and a fifteenth-century
baptismal font.
Worthy of note is the church of the Salvatore, built
in the Romanesque-Lombard style, with a graceful soaring bell tower with six
orders of double and triple lancet windows, built in the thirteenth century
with stones from the Via Amerina. The interior has a nave and two aisles and a
raised altar-table resting on a seventh-century cippus. The church houses a
ciborium of the sixteenth century, a Renaissance shrine with a fresco
attributed to the school of Lorenzo of Viterbo (Madonna enthroned with the
Child between St. Giovenale and St. Michael the Archangel), a fresco by
Domenico Velandi (one of the most precious works of fifteenth-century Viterbo
painting), depicting the Christ in Pietà between St. John, Joseph of
Arimathaea and the holy women: in the bottom register, between arches, are
Saints Francis, Clare and Bernardino of Siena. In addition, in the
right-hand apse we can admire a fifteenth-century fresco depicting the Madonna
and Child, Archangel and saint.
The small church of San Lanno contains a fresco of
the fifteenth-sixteenth century attributed to Domenico Velandi, while the church
of Santa Maria delle Grazie preserves fine sixteenth-century frescoes by
Pastura over the altar: above, the Annunciation; below the Nativity,
Madonna and Child and Adoration of the Magi. Depicted on the facade
the Madonna and Child, a fresco of the late fifteenth century of the
Viterbo school.
;)
