Sermoneta Culture

Sermoneta's culture is seigneurial, and the family name runs through it.

The Caetani purchased and expanded the castle in the thirteenth century, and the ducal title of Sermoneta is still held today — by Carlos Egerton Bragança de Bourbon del Monte Caetani Sforza, born in 1993. Few Italian hill towns have that kind of unbroken line attached to them.

The religious layer is unusually dense for a comune of under ten thousand: a thirteenth-century Romanesque collegiate church, a twelfth-century San Michele, a sixteenth-century San Giuseppe, and a Cistercian abbey at Valvisciolo below the town.

And there is a community the town no longer has. A Jewish community engaged in the commerce of fish and in lending lived here from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and was removed after Pius V's bull Hebraeorum gens sola of 1569 restricted Jewish residency to Rome and Ancona. That is three hundred years of local economic and social life ended by papal instrument, and it belongs in any honest account of the town.

Underneath everything is a much older identity on the ridge above — the polygonal-walled settlement that may, cautiously, have been Volscian Sulmo.