One day in 1861, German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius found himself standing outside the walls of a ‘lofty town’ called Aspra in the Sabine Hills north of Rome. The coachman who had brought him there from Terni told him he could go no further. So Gregorovius, who was there to consult the local archives, walked through a town gate into what he later described as a ‘wild, strange and forlorn place’ whose lanes ‘resembled the beds of mountain streams’.
Visitors to this remarkable borgo are still forced to leave their horse-drawn coaches (or cars) outside the walls. You wouldn’t call the place forlorn today – signs of recent restoration are everywhere, alongside the kind of neat window-box greenery that bespeaks civic pride – but you can see what Gregorovius meant. The steep cobbled lanes of the Medieval centro storico are made for mules; even a motorbike would have a hard time here, with all those low arches that call for deft bending and ducking. It’s not difficult to understand why this place earned the name Aspra (literally ‘Harsh’). In 1947, after years of lobbying, the authorities consented to a name change, and Aspra became Casperia – linking itself to a legendary power centre of the pre-Roman Sabine tribes that Virgil mentions in Book VII of The Aeneid.
After being eaten alive by bugs in ‘a kind of locanda’ owned by the local cobbler, Gregorovius appealed in desperation to the mayor, who arranged for him to stay with one of the town’s best families. He doesn’t name the palazzo where he was welcomed by ‘a tall young lady, dressed in Roman fashion... with city manners’, but the only real candidate, then as now, was Palazzo Forani, which that very year had been acquired by the Maldura family. He was surprised to be led through ‘a deserted reception room’, which – following a recent lightning strike – had ‘a rift in the wall from which the blue sky was visible’, but eventually his hostess showed Gregorovius into a ‘most habitable’ bedroom.
Anna Santarelli Forani is all too familiar with the challenges of looking after a historic palazzo, one that forms part of the town’s defensive wall, and thus has been exposed to all that the wind, rain and occasional electrical storm and earthquake can invent ever since it was built forthe Bruschi family at the end of the 16th century. No lightning strikes have happened on her watch since she and her two sisters inherited the palazzo from their mother in 2010, but the roof is in need of continual maintenance. That doesn’t prevent her from loving the place to bits. ‘It’s magical here,’ she says simply. If the palazzo’s few changes of ownership are well documented, the same does not go for its decorative history. It’s clear, however, that it was always one of the more modest grand houses of northern Lazio, far distant in its homely aristocratic charm from flamboyant dynastic statements such as the villas Lante or Farnese. Anna tells me that the oldest visible elements on the inside are likely to be some of the floors, including some delightful rhomboid cotto tiles designed, she believes, ‘to trick the eye into ignoring the fact that none of the walls are straight’.
Very little else of what we see today is older than the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After 1799, the Bruschi family briefly prospered by throwing in its lot with Napoleon – a bold move in an area under the control of the Vatican. The palazzo was given a Neoclassical makeover – but one clearly constrained by their limited resources. Four winsomely faux Doric columns were installed to ennoble the entrance hall, which ends in a Pompeii-red gallery of wall-mounted antiquarian fragments largely sourced, Anna believes, from finds in the Bruschi farm estates nearby.
Around the same time, the walls of a living room were covered in a series of large papier-peint panels illustrating episodes from The Aeneid. These include a bucolic Dido and Aeneas picnic scene set in what looks like a well-behaved version of the wild wooded landscape that still can be admired from the terrace. Upstairs, a blind corridor became a landscape gallery embellished by similarly idealised murals of the Roman campagna.
The Bruschis’ fall from grace following the restoration of papal authority likely put the brakes on anything resembling a top-to-toe renovation. But perhaps they had no desire to do more than modernise a few rooms – something they had already achieved in 1781, when a visit from the local cardinal-bishop pretty much demanded the creation of a lugubrious scarlet bedroom. Future owners would follow suit, adding and embellishing rather than ripping out and remaking. The result is a dizzy decorative time machine in which ancient vaulted ceilings co-exist with 19th-century trompe-l’oeil murals, Art Deco bathroom appliques and a souvenir cuckoo clock. Other time slips can be put down to provincial seclusion. After inheriting the palazzo, Anna’s great-uncle Luigi Forani decided that its ‘Oriental room’ needed refreshing (of uncertain date, this hovered somewhere between chinoiserie and japonaiserie). So in the 1950s he began to augment it with a touchingly naïf collection of bric-à-brac, brought back, she tells me, ‘from trips he made to Japan, India and the Middle East... It’s basically just a display of souvenirs.’
Today, a group of storerooms and a Medieval tower that was incorporated into the palazzo when it was built have been turned into holiday lets. But the historic part is open only for guided visits, receptions, film shoots – and Anna’s family and friends. Ever since she took over the running and upkeep after her mother’s death, this former school teacher has blended a determination to preserve the fragile charm of one of Lazio’s most authentic country abodes with an obvious delight in what is, she admits, something of an enchanted playhouse. On her regular forays to Casperia and her home in Milan, she is almost always accompanied by one or other of the female friends she’s known since her teaching days. ‘They all come here and help out. They make sure I’m never doing all this on my own,’ she says. Birthdays and other celebrations almost always call for a get-together in Casperia. Dancing and singing are mandatory. Men are rarely present. A modern-day Gregorovius would do well to ring ahead.
A version of this article appears in the May 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
Palazzo Forani, 136 Via Masari, 02041 Casperia, Rieti, Italy. For more information, ring 00 39 33 5679 5803, or visit palazzoforani.com
