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I first came to the Umbrian hilltop village of Giove half a lifetime ago. I was seeking sanctuary in the real Italy as I navigated potential closure of the British School at Rome (where I was director) at the hands of Mrs Thatcher’s government. I needed somewhere that was away from the pulsating fray to think and strategise. The Umbrian hilltop town and rooms in Giove’s outer defences of the medieval borgo came by chance. I loved life here and, fast forward to 2005, found a ruined farmhouse called the Pollaio (the ‘Chicken House’) that captivated me. It had two floors. Upstairs was one stark room, with a water tap and febrile electricity line, where a farming couple had lived. Below were two high rooms for their livestock and chickens. The couple possessed about two acres of sloping ground, mostly olives but with an array of unkempt fruit trees. It had lain ruined since 1996, when they had passed away. Its unexpected joy was the sweeping view of the Tiber valley, Monte Soratte to the south, the snow covered Sabina beyond, and the extinct chestnut-sheathed volcano Monte Cimino to the west. Five minutes from Giove castle, the post office, and pizzeria, the ruined Chicken House was a timeless piece of the Bel Paese, as Italy describes itself.
Now, of course, glories aside, Italy is never uncomplicated. It took five more years to make a house worthy of the spot, and another two – with the help of Silvio Grispigni, a railwayman who retired at 55 after the statutory 40 years of working – to put the olive grove and ageing vineyard, as well as the pasture of wildflowers, in order. In all those times, I ignored the history of this village, dominated by its castle that from afar resembles a power station puncturing the skyline. It took Sergio Fontana, an archaeologist who was recasting himself as a novelist, to make me think I should pay some attention. Sergio knows his stuff, showing me hidden treasures I had no idea of. He encouraged me to undertake a project with students from the American University of Rome, cut short by the COVID lock-down. Making sense of that project and many other ramblings across this landscape has led me to jot down the following notes.
Giove, like so many places in Italy, may seem unexceptional, but its archaeology unbeknown to most is full of abundant promise.
Castrum Iovis
Giove lies nearly 300m above sea level, its landscape comprising two very different parts. The first is the sloping hillside cut by deep wooded channels that drop down to the river Tiber. Beyond it lies the thin river valley, then to its west the volcanic plateau of northern Latium (home to the Etruscans). Today, the Tiber is a managed river listlessly winding towards Rome, an hour’s drive away by autostrada. The second part of the commune comprises flat fields set back from the valley, mostly olive groves that run towards a line of far wooded hills to the east.
Not much has changed here in recent centuries. A brooding oil painting by the Dutch artist Paul Bril, dating to 1601 (now in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome), highlights the wooded canyons leading up to the immense Farnese/Mattei castle. This was a palace by any other name. Below this fairy-tale castle with its banner, dwarfed by it, lay a borgo: a walled suburb crammed with houses, which exists still.
Giove takes its name from a putative temple dedicated to the most powerful of all gods and known as Castrum Iovis. The castle was founded in the 12th century – quite possibly on the ruins of the ancient temple – and sold to the Farnese family of Roman titans early in the 16th century. They, in turn, sold it to their peers, the Mattei family, who held it for three centuries. The oil painting by Paul Bril, in all likelihood, was commissioned by the Mattei to celebrate their audacious remodelling of the castle to resemble a low, modernist skyscraper. This grandiose building was evident to all passing southwards, a physical statement that Giove was the northern bastion of papal territory, as it had been by then for a millennium. After the Mattei, as Italy confronted its post-Renaissance history, it passed through many hands before being snapped up in the 1970s by a Californian film-maker. After his bankruptcy, it was purchased by a Roman family once again. Now heavily and carefully restored, with its light grey stucco it shimmers from afar like a sleeping giant. Inside, rooms graced with anonymous late Renaissance frescoes hint at a nostalgia for the age of Raphael and other masters. Great Umbrian painters, of course, did visit Giove.
Five hundred yards away, San Rocco chapel on the road to Amelia, now a war memorial to Giove’s lost sons, unexpectedly houses a pastel cycle of 16th-century anti-plague paintings attributed to the brothers Lorenzo and Bartolomeo Torresani. Another fresco of the Foligno school depicts the Crucifixion with the city of Jerusalem in the background. Just beyond it, is the 17th-century monastery of the Minor Friars, exquisitely restored by Giove’s Norwegian benefactors.
Fieldwalking
Since I first came to Giove, I have fieldwalked. I have been fieldwalking since I was 15, when I found pleasure in collecting the microliths, Neolithic blades, and Roman sherds in the ploughed acres of Wiltshire. (My mother despaired as cherished flakes invariably ended up rattling in the washing machine.) Today, there are far fewer ploughed fields in Giove. As the old contadini – baby boomers – pass away, once tended plots and fields are colonised first by scrub and then thickets of low woodland. In time, a green ocean will reconquer this landscape, as it did after the fall of the Roman Empire. The best time for fieldwalking is after the heavy ploughing with bulldozer tractors in September and early October, and better still after the deep rutted fields have been harrowed into powdery soil in November. The ploughed fields are ankle-turning to prospect. The harrowed fields have surfaces as fine as moon dust. In these, potsherds light up like carnelian gems.
The astonishing discovery is that nothing much pre-dates the 1st or 2nd century AD. I have yet to find one worked flint or sherd of prehistoric pottery. After my adolescent days in Wiltshire’s ploughed fields, I find this absence astonishing. As for the Etruscans, whose monuments, farms, and tombs are thick on the volcanic terrain in northern Latium/Lazio, west of the river Tiber, almost nothing remains in Giove. This beggars belief locally, and has fanned a story that has grown with telling of how two Etruscan funerary statuettes were found by road construction workers… or (depending on whom you listen to) came from the large warren of caves beside the Tiber, where the villagers sought refuge during the Second World War. In one telling, these small Giacometti-like bronzes ended up in Perugia; in another, they went to Rome. Sixty years later, they have become a village fable.
Malvicino’s secrets
Sergio brought me first to Malvicino. It was the lure of the statuettes that led him to this abandoned farm. Once a casale belonging to the castle in its ducal pomp, it is today a late-19th-century farmhouse, alongside which towers an aberrant abandoned electricity cabin. The old house sits on the first terrace overlooking the river, a long, stately property that is now surrounded by a newish plantation of hazels (crops destined for the huge Nutella industry). On the terrace edge immediately north of the farmhouse are the remains of a Roman cistern. Set back behind this cistern, on the terrace above, is a ruined 19th-century pigsty that conceals a millennial story.
The pigsty has not accommodated a pig in aeons. Falling apart, its north room is simply eye-popping for any archaeologist. Its north wall is built of layers of mostly complete Roman tiles bonded into a thick mud fabric, a pounded earth wall construction known in Italy as pisé. In my view, this is part of an early medieval building, perhaps a small tower that pre-dates the 12th-century building fashion here to use ashlar cut from volcanic pozzolana stone. The east wall is altogether different and no less striking. Here, between one and three courses of large cut conglomerate blocks, each with the thin slot for a lead tie, surely belonged to a later Republican or early Imperial monumental building. Cleaning up this east side, it is quickly clear that the large blocks are in their original position. In other words, a major Roman building – a temple or something similar – had stood parallel to the terrace edge immediately overlooking the ancient cistern. This building, perhaps once roofed with tiles, was then repurposed, in all likelihood in Late Antiquity and certainly before the High Middle Ages, as a small residential tower nestling in the ancient ruin. A third feature of the pigsty is no less intriguing. Chunks of tile-made herringbone floor – opus spicatum – are cemented into its 19th-century walls. More blocks of floor fragments survive in the old casale. Taken as fragments of a once elaborately laid floor, these must have belonged to either the monumental building or perhaps some fine associated structure. Opus spicatum, Sergio points out to me, is well known at Trajan’s Market in Rome. This detail, as I shall show below, may have some significance.
The enigmatic remains at this terrace-top farm do not stop with the pigsty. The deep, large cellar below the long farmhouse itself is actually carved out of the rock. In the cemented wall on one side is the top of a well-preserved Dressel 1 amphora. Sergio favours this originally being a second cistern, in line with the example immediately to the north (below the pigsty) described above. This is not all. The abandoned electricity tower sits on a bramble-laced squared block of natural stone. The function of the squared block is unclear. Is it the base of something ancient, a mausoleum or small shrine? A geophysical survey beside it made in February 2020 revealed nothing to help elucidate its original form.
This spectral abandoned farm is intriguing. Sergio and I have long indulged in speculating about the meaning of this palimpsest of remains. First off, it appears to have been a prominent point on a road, descending from Bomarzo in Latium to the west, that crossed the Tiber at Attigliano (where a ferry existed until the 1950s – Silvio, my gardener, used it regularly to visit Giove from his Lazio village to court his future wife). After reaching Malvicino, the road headed across the hills by way of the source of the Rio Giove (see below) towards the ancient Umbrian town of Amelia, with its imposing polygonal fortifications (named after the mythical Umbrian king called AmeroÎ, the son of Atlas). Was the forerunner of the casale at Malvicino once a sanctuary, temple, or prominent tomb, blessed with a natural fountain, a landmark on the western edge of Amelia’s territory in early Roman times?
San Valentino
The most prominent Roman monument from Giove is a long, brick-built wall (ostensibly masking a palimpsest of building phases) that appears to support a terrace immediately above the river Tiber. Running at right angles to it is the 19th-century railway line on a high embankment that follows the Tiber valley from Florence to Rome. The brick-built Roman wall lies a kilometre to the south of Malvicino, almost certainly close to where there was a small port, one of numerous Roman embarkation and ferry docks along the middle reaches of the Tiber. The brick wall retains a large flat field in which Roman tesserae and armfuls of pottery have been found in ploughing over the years. Here, too, it is said, was a church dedicated to a local St Valentine that was demolished by the railway-builders. Its only legacy is a distinctive sculpted stone capital of 9th- or 10th-century date, which survives in the nearby farm.
Our geophysical survey of the flat ground retained by the wall, appropriately made on a gloriously warm St Valentine’s Day in 2020, found nothing that was especially useful. I had hoped that the survey might throw up the buried signatures of shops, streets, and alleys, as well as houses similar to the excavated Tiber port 3km to the south at Seripola, on the Via Amerina as it passed from Rome’s immediate hinterland up to Amelia in western Umbria. The survey data at San Valentino were simply too ‘noisy’ to be helpful. One reason for this became clear to me in 2025.
The village decided to celebrate Liberation Day – 25 April – in 2025 with a memorial to an American bomber crew that lost their lives at Giove. Almost a hundred of us listened on the hillside below the castle to a 92-year-old who, in the same spot in April 1944, had witnessed a B-25 Mitchell bomber crashing there. Inside, at least two of its crew perished, killed by German flak. Three men parachuted to safety. The bomber, we then learnt in a lecture in the village hall, was part of a flotilla that was destroying strategic targets along the railway line that brought matériel from Germany to Rome, and thereafter the Monte Cassino front. The lecturers then showed us some of the RAF air photographs of Giove taken to aid the bombers. Over the decades I have made a lot of use of similar images, although these tend to have been taken at 10,000 feet and too high for anything but general topographical detailing of that time. In this case, though, I was to be surprised. The lecturers next showed a 15-second film taken as one bomber headed towards the critical railway bridge over the Tiber, its guns blazing away at the target. All at once I understood the ‘noise’ in the geophysical survey. San Valentino had been pounded with bombs and machine-gun volleys that badly damaged the vital railway and left a very particular signature at the archaeological site.
The Roman wall at San Valentino and the railway line on its embankment at 90∞ to it would seem, on the face of it, to define the bounds of the archaeological site. But this, of course, is a chimera. One day, I decided to pass through the high 19th-century arch carrying the railway over the Tiber to the next field and there, in the ploughed field, was the unmistakable debris of a Roman brick and tile kiln. This was one of the many brick and tile factories that lay alongside the Tiber in Giove, belonging to a moment in the 2nd century when the commune not only flourished, but contributed to building immense monuments like Trajan’s Forum in Rome and a new harbour in the great port at Ostia, known as Portus.
Giove’s brick-making story is a modern discovery by an unlikely scholar. Giorgio Filippi studied epigraphy at La Sapienza University, Rome, in the 1970s, and had the good fortune to be employed by the Vatican Museum to study its large collection of Roman brick stamps. His career was spent making sense of the bolli, mostly the circular stamps bearing the names of their Roman makers or factory owners. Through Sergio, I persuaded Giorgio, now retired, to visit Giove one day and give me a tour of its brick-making archaeology. He is a wiry fellow who exudes an immediate excitement for his discipline. Before making off into the head-high brambles beside the Tiber, he told me how he first came to visit Giove. The traditional view of the brickmakers who built Rome was that they had factories somewhere in the metropolis. Giorgio increasingly became suspicious of this narrative, as none had ever come to light in Rome. Instead, he found evidence of kilns dotted along the Tiber and then, by chance, around the turn of the millennium, at Giove – after the remains attracted the curiosity of a local policeman.
On a visit in about 2000, Giorgio found the first site next to the late medieval watchtower beside the Tiber depicted in Bril’s oil painting of 1601, half a kilometre south of San Valentino. There, he told me, the field was full of large tiles with the stamps belonging to a Rutilius Lupus. Many, he said, were tossed away after ploughing into the brambles beside the 40m high slope dropping down to the Tiber. ‘Let’s go’, he urged, with no further explanation, and off we charged. Like Indiana Jones, this 70-year-old worked his way along the slippery Tiber edge, through the lattice of brambles clutching at his clothes, until he found what he was looking for. Then, like a terrier after a fox, he started to lever up tile fragments, desperate to find examples with bolli. Somewhat dejected that after 20 years only one example with a feint imprint came to light, he decided to beat his way through the brambles to take me on to other brick-making sites. In fact, together we found at least four more sites, as well as a pile of stacked tiles retained by a Roman wall at the only house in the vicinity, La Barca – the house of the ferryman who, until modern times, ran the service across the Tiber here. Giorgio, on the evidence of the Roman bolli, named each of the Roman owners of the brick kilns as though they lived still. For decades, these Tiberside brickmakers had shaped his academic world. Giovesi in Roman times, he purred, had played a part in building some of Rome’s most vaunted monuments.
Elsewhere, though, the evidence of these Giovesi ancients is pitifully vestigial. I have found some small pottery scatters belonging to tiny dwellings on the first terrace edge overlooking the Tiber (homes perhaps to the men involved in quarrying clay in open pits and felling timber to fire the kilns) as well as one small villa rustica (with an accompanying brick-kiln). One oddity, perhaps Roman or else another legacy of the Farnese or Mattei family, is a fastidiously made columbarium overlooking the Tiber. Exquisitely constructed – and one of many in the region – this tantalising mystery was for breeding doves and harvesting their eggs, as well as their dung.
Large villas appear to be absent. The nearest small villa, thought to have been owned by the grandparents of the Younger Pliny’s wife, lies two miles to the south. Located close to the Tiber crossing at Seripola, this chance and largely unpublished discovery was made in the 1970s next to a farm prized for its mozzarellas.
Otherwise, once the brick-making works fell into disuse after Trajan’s ambitious excessiveness, Giove once again returned to being a green ocean until Rome’s Renaissance families arrived.
The lost watermill
The putative Roman road from Malvicino to Amelia described above was long thought to pass eastwards over a bridge in the Rio Giove, the deep brook that runs through the valley far below Giove’s imposing castle. The bridge, its abutments photographed long ago, had been lost in recent times to a mountain of blackberry brambles close to a large early modern mill, known as La Mola, which served the Mattei castle. But was the bridge Roman in date, or an access road from the wheat fields around Malvicino to the big late-Renaissance mill? Giovanni Guida, Giove’s antiquarian, decided to help me resolve whether the bridge was Roman or Renaissance in date. On one bright, late winter’s day, with Silvio’s nephew Marco, we penetrated the brambles with an industrial sickle. Our efforts showed beyond doubt that this autostrada-sized bridge belonged to early modern rather than Roman times, its construction being a mixture of coarse water-rolled rocks and tile-detailing that is quite unlike any Roman handiwork. Its discovery, however, showed the ambition involved in making the castle’s mill, La Mola. It also led me to make a survey of its likely precursor in the wooded hills a kilometre or so to the east.
The ruined mill of La Botte (translated as ‘the cask’) is one of three close to the source of the water racing down the Rio Giove. The source itself is fenced off today, bringing to mind the ProvenÁal film Manon des Sources (1986), about a conflict over water rights. It is enough to record that, a decade ago, Sergio photographed an ancient altar in front of the spring associated with Roman potsherds. Today, to Sergio’s dismay, this once sacred slab has ‘disappeared’. The altar, as well as the gushing gallons, may explain why two medieval mills were built mere metres away downslope, and a third, La Botte, following the same design, was made a kilometre further on. All three mills appear in an elegant if slightly inaccurate watercolour plan of 1810-1824 in the Mattei archive, but are plainly older. The ruins of two of the mills lie concealed beneath jungle-like vegetation. Not so, as Sergio shows me, La Botte.
The mill at La Botte, safe from any issues with landowners, has fascinated me. The ruins consist of a small millhouse with two rooms and space for a horizontal wheelhouse below. Additionally, it possessed a side storage annexe, served by a mule-wide stone bridge. The mill drew water 60m away, off the fast-flowing Rio della Para, along a narrow leet to a large, trapezoidal millpond, its walls still preserved in places to a height of 4m. From a point high above the millhouse, located precariously on a north-facing rockface, water was then channelled downwards through a sluice gate to drive large granite stones abandoned when La Botte was eventually deserted.
The original mill at La Botte, without any tile-detailing, probably dates to the later Middle Ages, before the Farnese and then the Mattei massively aggrandised the castle. La Botte is mentioned in rental agreements registered between Asdrubale Mattei and Nillo de Rossi for 1598 and 1601. Further, in 1602 the mill was rented by one Francesco Andrea di Irscio. The mill, though, appears to have been struck by an earthquake that badly damaged its perilously positioned house. After some time, La Botte was restored using the same construction as the autostrada bridge at La Mola. As far as I can tell, it occupied the footprint of its predecessor from about the later 18th century until the later 19th century. Now lost in thick woodland, a track channelled through a dark passage made of lichen-coated walls proceeds from its mule-sized bridge to a nearby early modern farmhouse, intriguingly named after Rutilius, the Trajanic-period brickmaker. Try as I might, I have failed to find one Roman potsherd around this evocatively named dwelling. Nothing links its modern name to the stamped tiles beloved by Giorgio Filippi. That said, with so many fields now colonised by scrub and woodland, one day for sure something will emerge that explains this unlikely connection between two points 5km apart – the east–west width of Giove’s commune.
Giove is a village like so many throughout central Italy that begs for more archaeological attention. But then, as the Italians say with a sigh, the country has too much archaeology. How can it be expected to care for it all? This may be a truism, but the brickmakers that worked in Trajanic times alongside the Tiber, taking advantage of the timber here to send barges of their terracotta products to the Eternal City, belong to a heroic age of monumentalism. Their bolli, diligently studied by Giorgio Filippi, tell a special story. I must admit that the harrowed remains of these named-checked kilns and their debris is a travesty on a par with the lost ancient altar at the source of the Rio Giove. Both deserved better. Nonetheless, the delight in disentangling the largely anonymous stories of Malvicino and the mill at La Botte are encouragement enough to keep fieldwalking, as well as keeping an eye out for other lost treasures in this oft-forgotten tract of Umbria.
Richard Hodges is President Emeritus of the American University of Rome.
All images: courtesy of Richard Hodges, unless otherwise stated
