Sutri historical timeline

Sutri's origins — anciently Sutrium — are very ancient, as numerous archaeological finds from various periods in the area attest, probably going back to the Bronze Age.

Legend offers two foundations. One attributes it to an ancient people of eastern navigators, the Pelasgi. Others speak of foundation by Saturn, who appears in the comune's own coat of arms on horseback with three ears of wheat in his hand.

The town developed strongly under Etruscan domination, as an agricultural and commercial centre. As an obligatory passage into Etruria, it was definitively conquered by the Romans in 383 BC, after the fall of Veii. Afterwards it bore the passage of successive barbarian hordes travelling along the Via Cassia towards Rome, serving as a bulwark of the consulate and of the empire.

Between the fifth and eighth centuries Sutri was caught up in the struggles between the Lombards and the Byzantines. Then, in 728, the Lombard king Liutprand offered the city and the surrounding lands to Pope Gregory II. The Donation of Sutri is considered the beginning of the temporal dominion of the Church — the first step in the construction of the Patrimony of Saint Peter. The Papal States, which would last until 1870, begin with this transaction over a small tufa town on the Cassia.

The ninth century brings the legend of Bertha, sister of Charlemagne, disinherited and exiled because of a relationship with a man of humble origins. On the road to Rome she is said to have stopped at Sutri — which some say she had received from her brother as a residence — and there, in a cave, to have given birth to Roland, the future paladin of France and protagonist of the Chanson and of much later literature.

And the town kept attracting travellers who wrote. Petrarch, describing his first journey to Rome in a letter to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, writes about Sutri.