A city to discover: Colleferro

Colleferro - To the south of the capital, in the Sacco valley, Colleferro rises, a place where antiquity joins rapid industrial development. It has very ancient origins and some testimonies are collected and kept in the archaeological museum of the Toleriense area. These testimonies, ranging from the prehistoric to the medieval period, are the result of hard research that has lasted since the 1970s.

The route offered is suitable for both school groups and adult visitors. The paleontological material dates back to 350,000 years ago and most of it comes from animal bones, including those of 5 elephants who lived in that area. From an industrial point of view Colleferro is important at a national level in the field of space. The main church, an example of rationalist architecture, is that of Santa Barbara which with its three large arches on the facade recalls those of the castle. It was the engineer Leopoldo Parodi Delfino, together with Senator Bombrini in 1912, who founded the factory of Exclusive. Inside the church there is a magnificent mosaic by Mazzacurati that portrays the patron saint with the explosion of the TNT factory in the center in 1938. A must is certainly the telecommunications museum with specimens from different, rare or even unique. Having to send all the discarded material from the Second World War to the foundry, a lieutenant at the time, passionate about these objects, took them in charge, starting a sort of collection. The jewel in the crown is the room dedicated to Marconi where the original objects of the Nobel Prize in physics are jealously guarded. There is also a room dedicated to model making and collecting. In Colleferro it is still possible to visit the air-raid shelters where all the citizens took refuge in times of war. The tunnels are born as quarries of pozzolana that was extracted to be able to build on the surface; later they were used during the Second World War, making them a permanent home between '43 and '44. Today it is a kind of museum where some exhibitions also take place.