Mandela

Near the confluence of the Licenza stream with the Aniene river, Mandela stands, in the province of Rome, where Monti Lucretili slope down towards the river.

The name Mandela is none other than that by which the village was known in Roman times. Horace, in the quoted epistle (1, 16, 1-14

The village is mentioned by Horace in one of his epistles as Pagus Mandela, name only taken up again after 1870; in 1191 Pope Celestine III granted it, with Vicovaro, as a fiefdom to his Orsini nephews to save it from the expansionist aims of the city of Tivoli and the abbeys of Farfa and Subiaco.

In 1650, it passed from the Orsini to the Nunez family, then in 1814 to the Marquises Del Gallo di Roccagiovine, who, at the hands of the Marquise Julie Charlotte Bonaparte, niece of Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and later King of Spain, and wife of the Roman Marquis Alessandro Gaetano Carlo del Gallo di Roccagiovine, turned it into a literary salon frequented by artists, painters and men of culture.

Worth visiting are the Church of St Nicholas, erected in the 11th century when the Abbey of Farfa carried out the encastellation of the "podium de Burdella" and the fortification of the village of Cantalupo already belonging to the then-decayed Abbey of San Cosimato, and the Church of St Vincent, containing funerary monuments of the Del Gallo and Bonaparte families.