Founded on the remains of a large Roman Villa from the 3rd century AD, Villa San Giovanni in Tuscia is a small and quiet village born around 1500, when the area was under the control of the Anguillara Orsini family.
Much of the ancient remains of the town are the ruins of the Roman Villa of which some mosaics and a section of the city walls are visible.
Nature around the village is very suggestive, a large valley with lush vegetation, a typical landscape of the Viterbo Tuscia surrounded by olive groves and chestnut and oak woods. Not far from the sea, it is the ideal place to spend a summer holiday in a camper, trekking and horseback. In the countryside and in the woods, we find two interesting Etruscan necropolises called Grottone and Ponton Graziolo with numerous chamber tombs, testifying residential settlements dating back to that period.
The Church of San Giovanni Battista from 1700 and the Church of Santa Maria with four Baroque altars are very interesting.
The proximity to two ancient communication roads, the Via Clodia and the Via Cassia, made the village vulnerable to looting by the armies marching towards Rome. For this reason, there is no longer any trace of many important monuments except in the archives.
A typical and tasty local delicacy is the pezzata, to which a festival is dedicated, a poor dish of the pastoral tradition (similar to sheep goulash) prepared at the time for the “carosini” during the sheep shearing period.
Among the unmissable events, the Tripe Festival in July, the Pezzata and sheep kebab festival in August.