Montebuono
The church of San Pietro ad Muricentum or ad Centomuros (Hundred Walls), is so-called in the ancient documents because of the imposing structures, belonging to a Roman villa, which surround it. It lies just outside the village of Montebuono, on a hill dominated by the Sabine mountains and overlooking the Tiber valley. Despite numerous alterations through the centuries, the church still preserves the plan of the original Romanesque structure which recent restoration work has brought to light. The laying down of a new pavement revealed a series of rooms, in part reused as ossuaries, which belonged to the Roman villa. The villa is normally known as the "Baths of Agrippa" because of a fragment of an inscription found among the ruins which mention the General Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the son-in-law of the Emperor Augustus, who died at the age of 51 in Campania in 12 BC.

The construction of the church included the reuse of much material of the Roman period. The walIs of the villa were only partly destroyed and therefore mosaics, pavements in opus spicatum, walI paintings and a cistern have re-emerged to give a fascinating glimpse of some of the rooms belonging to the more luxurious living quarters of the villa, which was clearly a building of enormous dimensions.

Whether or not the villa belonged to the great General of the Augustan period, at some point it passed into the hands of the Licini family, as we know from the maps of the Abbey of Farfa which record the existence of a fundus Licinianus from 998. The church of San Pietro ad Muricentum was built during the lively political climate of the early 12th century and is first mentioned in July 1105.

San Pietro was the focus for the rural population until the foundation of Montebuono, which pro-bably took place at the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century, when we have the first references to the new settlement. This was a period in which the tendency was to reunite the population, who had previousy lived in small and dispersed settlements, with the church as the focal poínt.

In the 15th century San Pietro was still the main church of Montebuono, as attested by numerous legacies and the important series of wallpaintings. These were executed by Jacopo of Roccantíca, a pupil of Ottaviano Nelli, although no longer fully visible today they still decorate the apse, where one can see a remarkable Last Judgement, and part of the right nave. According to a cartouche under the nativity scene the Sabine painter was commissioned to carry out the work by the «bone done de Montebonu» (the good women of Montebuono). After the council of Trento, the parish functions were transferred to the church of Santa Maria Assunta, constructed withín the castello, probably in 1408, near the palazzo comunale, while San Pietro continued to function as the cemetery church. The beautiful bell tower is detached from the church and was originally several storeys higher.