Sermoneta historical timeline

Sermoneta's territory was populated already in protohistoric times, as the Necropolis of Caracupa attests: about a hundred Iron Age inhumations have been found there, representative of the Cultura laziale, the Latial Culture.

The site is associated with the ancient settlement of Valvisciolo, which occupied the ridge of Monte Carbolino immediately above the abbey, where remains of large walls in polygonal work are documented. Those structures have been interpreted not as simple agricultural terracing but as part of a complex organised on several levels, with residential and defensive function. On that reading the necropolis of Caracupa represents the funerary sector of a community stably settled in the area, able to control the hillside and to take part in the cultural relations of ancient Latium.

And — though with much caution, which is the source's own emphasis — it has been hypothesised that this settlement may correspond to the ancient Volscian city of Sulmo.

The medieval town is dominated by its castle. It was built by the Annibaldi family, then purchased and expanded by the Caetani in the thirteenth century — the family of Boniface VIII, the pope seized at Anagni in 1303.

The religious fabric runs alongside it: the Collegiate Church of Santa Maria Assunta of the thirteenth century, Romanesque and sometimes erroneously called a cathedral; San Michele, mainly of the twelfth century; San Giuseppe, mainly of the sixteenth; and the Cistercian abbey of Valvisciolo nearby.

There is one more community in this history, and its end is precisely dated. A Jewish community engaged in the commerce of fish and in lending is attested at Sermoneta from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, when the community was removed following Pope Pius V's papal bull of expulsion, Hebraeorum gens sola (1569), which restricted Jewish residency to Rome and Ancona. Three centuries of presence ended by a single instrument.

The ducal title survives: the current holder of the title of Duca di Sermoneta is Carlos Egerton Bragança de Bourbon del Monte Caetani Sforza, born in 1993.