Vasanello, a small village along the Amerina Way, a Roman republican way completed after the submission of the Falisci in 241 BC,
to unite the Cassia Road to Amelia and the rest of Umbria and complete the Romanization design of Central Italy. The Faliscans were an indigenous Italic population, strongly influenced by the Etruscan neighbors’s culture, to whom we owe the first carving of the red tuff of this area, for the excavation of tombs, cave ways and other evidences of their rupestrian civilization and of their own way of settling in the territory, in villages located in the tufaceous plains and necropolis in the shady gorges. In the thick woods, near the village, barely visible amid leaves and shrubs, there are traces of a furnace discharge, discovered by chance in 1975 and dated about a century after the Roman conquest of the territory. The site has brought out the Faliscan-Roman ceramics activity signs: not rough ceramics, but fine cousin ceramics, in "Arezzo" style, which led to the hypothesis that Vasanello, already in the Faliscan era, was a productive branch of the prestigious Etruscan Aretine ceramics workshops in Tuscany. We are not just talking about a simple artisan village, but a true production center able to export its products to other regions. From this site, moving through the surrounding countryside it is possible to see the witnesses of ceramic productions’ historical continuity, with always excellent quality levels, up to the present day. This circumstance has made someone fall into the temptation to attribute the name of the village to its renowned tradition: “Vasanello” deriving from “vessel” (but it is not true). The old village retains some kilns from the Middle Age-Renaissance, while the raw material, clay, was extracted in local deposits. Vasanello’s woods also show evidence of a territory settlement that covers the entire historical arch, with the charm and wonder of the medieval settlement of Palazzolo and the medieval-Renaissance village. A continuity and liveliness of settlement that today seems strident with the atmosphere of total immersion in nature that these countryside have. Since the 1920s the area has been extensively deforested for cultivation, according to the traditional promiscuous agriculture criteria, which was later replaced and largely obliterated by intensive hazelnut cultivation. It is the residual persistence of remnants of traditional crops that makes us appear this countryside a living landscape that frames the silent memory of a rupestrian world and a glorious industry tradition.
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