VIA UGOLINI

HISTORICAL NOTES AND DESCRIPTION

Via Ugolini in Vitorchiano is the street that leads from piazza della SS. Trinità leads, through a narrow alley, to a second door subsequently opened in the walls and which allows direct passage from the village to the external squares, used only for parking purposes. So named in the twentieth century in honor of the historian Biagio Ugolini, given the particular interest the historian who lived from 1702 to 1775 gave to Jewish culture and given that from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth century the street was the Vitorchiano ghetto. Worthy of note, Biagio Ugolini is remembered in particular for the “Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum and its sources”, an accurate selection of Jewish sources of 34 volumes in folio with Latin translation on the front made between 1744 and 1769. The alley it is characteristic because it is surrounded both on the right and on the left by a series of stairways leading to private homes, most of which, especially in the last stretch of the road, are characterized by the presence of profferlo stairs. The street, inserted between the first and second walls, probably arose in the fifteenth century, at the time of the great development of this area of ​​the city. The profferlo is a term derived from the late Latin proferŭlum, in turn derived from the Greek προφερής, “placed in front”. The structure of the buildings in Via Ugolini consists of a single-flight staircase that runs along the facade of the building. At the top of the staircase there is a small loggia that precedes the entrance door to the house. Below the staircase there is a half arch that encloses the access to the ground floor room, generally intended as a shop, cellar or, more rarely, a stable. The Profferlo is the characteristic form of external staircase used in the medieval civil architecture of Lazio and especially in the Viterbo area, where it reached truly remarkable artistic forms. In the medieval house in Viterbo, the main floor of the house is raised above street level by just enough for the development of a service ground floor. To reach this floor, a short staircase is therefore sufficient, generally with a single flight, which runs along the facade of the house and leads to a large landing, which is at the same time a balcony, on which the door opens. entrance to the house. Thanks to a second door at the bottom of the staircase, the balcony was separated from the street. In buildings of a certain importance, the profferlo develops instead inside the courtyard, as in the Palazzo degli Alessandri in Viterbo. Structurally, the profferlo consists of a large lame arch, built in cantilevered form by means of long ashlars embedded in the wall against which it rests. In some later and larger examples, such as the Mazzatosta building in Viterbo, the balcony is instead supported by corbels and columns. In more recent architecture, the external staircase of this type has remained only in the more modest houses and in unadorned forms. But both in these purely practical and unpretentious manifestations, and in the rich and decorated original ones, it still constitutes perhaps the most picturesquely characteristic element of the old streets of Vitorchiano. Going along via Ugolini you will thus encounter an uninterrupted succession of proffered structures, such as a house, which has the entrance inscribed in a round arch with the date engraved at the top: MC 1893, or the other that has the entrance with architrave engraved with the date: M / P / CCCCCXXIII I.

ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Foscari F. – Ugolini B.; Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum e le sue fonti. Venezia, 1769.

Special thanks to Dr. Andrea Presutti for scientific advice and archival photographic material provided on Vitorchiano.

– Vitorchiano com’era Facebook page for collecting old photos of the beautiful village of Vitorchiano, in the province of Viterbo. Images of the country, its inhabitants and its traditions.