Morlupo is perched on a horseshoe-shaped tufa rock spur, surrounded by steep plunging crags, with higgledy-piggledy rows of houses, overlooking the Tiber Valley. It is about 30 km from Rome. In Roman times the Ad Vigesimum Station, one of the mansiones [stopping places] marking 20 miles on the ancient Via Flaminia was situated here.
Morlupo has been the stage set for movies and TV series. Some scenes of the TV series “Liberate mio figlio”, inspired by the kidnapping of Cesare Casella, were shot in Piazza Giovanni XXIII. The same location was chosen for part of the film “I morti non pagano tasse” by Sergio Grieco, while the town cemetery was used for some epic scenes in the movie “Grande, grosso e Verdone”.
The town was birthplace of the Venerable Caterina Paluzzi (1573-1645), founder of the now abandoned Dominican monastery, poet and devotee of Dante Domenico A. Venturini (1808-1876) and novelist Antonio G. Quattrini (1877-1936).
In the town we can visit the Orsini Castle, destroyed in 1433, but reconstructed by Antimo Orsini in 1598, and the early 17th-century Palazzetto Borghese, embellished with decorative moulding at the entrance and on the balcony. It originally belonged to the Mattei family and today is privately owned.
The rediscovery in the Forum Morolupum of some Christian catacombs is evidence that the area was already inhabited as far back as the IV-V century. The origins of Morlupo are linked with the Capenates, the flourishing Italic people who settled along the right bank of the River Tiber prior to the arrival of the Romans, as well as with the Faliscans and Sabines and the Etruscan territory of Veio. The natural beauty of the areas where these peoples lived is quite amazing: Parco di Veio, Mount Soratte and the Tevere-Farfa Nature Reserve.
In Morlupo you must taste the Baciona sausage, which has had the honour of a festival dedicated to it (on the last Sunday of October) since 1967: in the centre of the main square the sausages are grilled over an oak wood fire while the 1967 “Bolla” is read out – a sort of semi-serious, semi-humorous manifesto that extols the flavour of the sausage, without, however, revealing its recipe.