Ariccia

Ariccia is a Castelli Romani town with two parallel identities and one excellent reason to visit beyond either: porchetta. The first identity is the Baroque jewel: Gian Lorenzo Bernini redesigned the entire town centre for the Chigi family between 1661 and 1672 — Palazzo Chigi (the family's summer residence, still preserved with original 17th-c furnishings as a museum and palazzo-house since 1988), Santa Maria dell'Assunzione (Bernini's circular church with a dome modelled on the Pantheon), and the great Piazza di Corte that ties them together — one of the few intact Baroque urban ensembles outside Rome itself. The second identity is geological: Ariccia sits on the rim of the Alban Hills volcanic complex, and the 312m Ponte Monumentale (1854, a triple-tier brick viaduct that became famous after a series of suicides in the 1990s now blocked with high railings) spans the deep crater valley of Vallericcia from the town to the next ridge.

Below the eastern side: Lago di Albano (5 km), Lago di Nemi (3 km), and the Castel Gandolfo papal estate (open to the public since 2014). The porchetta: Ariccia porchetta IGP — whole pork loin deboned, seasoned with rosemary, garlic, pepper and wild fennel, slow-roasted on rotating spits in wood-fired ovens, served at room temperature in panini or by the etto in the fraschette (informal trattorias, originally outdoor wine vendors with frasche - branches - as signs). There are 30+ fraschette in the town, the most famous concentrated in Vicolo Volta della Costa.

Saturday lunch in Ariccia means porchetta + Frascati or Marino white wine from the same Castelli, full stop. The town is a Città del Vino. The Roman past: Aricia was the southern terminus of the original Via Appia (312 BC) and the site of the Latin League's federal sanctuary of Diana Aricina at the neighbouring Lago di Nemi.