One of the oldest towns in classical Rome’s domains and a significant staging-post on the Via Claudia (sometimes written ‘Clodia’), a military highway in the 3rdC BC and now a state highway. For all that, its history is sketchy. It seems to have kept out of trouble and settled for a humble agricultural existence. The Romanesque church of St Francis is worth a visit. The duomo has a fresco by Antonio da Viterbo, an early Renaissance painter of provincial importance. The nearby Rocca dei Vico, an aggressive crag-top fortress, was garrisoned in the Second World War and almost entirely destroyed.

At Vetralla you are in the heart of metropolitan Etruria, surrounded by buried treasures. Biera is covered separately in this section, but here you can run west on Route l bis and after 9 km turn north for Norcia. Its ‘rocky necropoli’ − tombs hollowed in tufa rock − have unusually refined effigies and friezes on their sarcophagi. A deep split in the rocks, about 0.5 km long, is for walking through or viewing from the main road which crosses it.