Frascati historical timeline

The earliest traces of human presence in the Alban Hills go back to the Lower Palaeolithic, between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, and consist of flint tools found in the area and attributed to Neanderthals.

The first people to settle the Alban Hills permanently were the Latins. Four centuries before the founding of Rome they had established their cities here — Alba Longa, Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium and Velitrae among the principal ones — firmly allied in the confederation known as the Latin League.

The most significant archaeological finds are Roman and belong to a patrician villa associated with Lucullus and then with the Flavian imperial dynasty. In the first century AD its owner was Gaius Sallustius Crispus Passienus, who married Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero; his properties were later confiscated by the Flavians.

According to the Liber Pontificalis, in the ninth century Frascati was a little village, probably founded two centuries earlier. Its name probably comes from the local tradition of collecting firewood — frasche — and many place-names around the town still refer to trees or wood.

The turning point was the death of its neighbour. After the destruction of nearby Tusculum in 1191 the town's population increased and the bishopric moved from Tusculum to Frascati. Innocent III endorsed the city as a feudal possession of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, but in the following centuries its territories were ravaged by frequent raids that impoverished it. It was owned by various baronial families, including the Colonna, until in 1460 Pius II fortified the city with walls.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Julius II gave Frascati as a feudal possession to the condottiero Marcantonio I Colonna, who lived there from 1508 with his wife Lucrezia della Rovere, the pope's niece. In 1515 Colonna gave Frascati its first statute, the Statuti e Capituli del Castello di Frascati, under the Latin title Populus antiquae civitas Tusculi. A hospital named after St Sebastian was built in 1518, and after Colonna's death in 1522 Lucrezia della Rovere sold Frascati to Pier Luigi Farnese, nephew of Paul III.

On 1 May 1527 a Landsknecht company that had just sacked Rome arrived from the neighbouring villages. The soldiers changed direction beside a roadside shrine consecrated to the Virgin Mary, and the town was spared; the event is commemorated by the church now called Capocroce.

In 1538 Paul III conferred the title of Civitas on Frascati under the name Tusculum Novum, and in 1598 construction began on a new cathedral dedicated to St Peter.

And on 15 September 1616 the first public and free school in Europe was established here, on the initiative of Saint Joseph Calasanz.