Capena (until 1933 called Leprignano) is a town and comune in the Metropolitan City of Rome, Lazio region (central Italy). The town has borrowed its modern name from a pre-Roman and Roman settlement that was to its north. Geography Capena is located north of Rome (as the crow flies), above the valley of the Tiber. The old quarter stands on a hill overlooking the valley of the Fosso di Morlupo to the west, while the modern district extends into the eastern plain. The neighbouring towns are Castelnuovo di Porto, Civitella San Paolo, Fiano Romano, Monterotondo, Morlupo and Rignano Flaminio. History Ancient era The original Capena occupied the plateau of a nowadays uninhabited hill called La Civitucola, which is about northeast of a post station on the ancient Via Flaminia. Its territory was known in ancient times as the Ager Capenas, which was a Faliscan area adjacent (and culturally allied) to Etruria. It is frequently mentioned alongside of Veii, Falerii and Lucus Feroniae. Ancient Capena seems to have been ruthlessly sacked by the Romans sometime around 390 BC, following a long campaign of resistance by the Capenates to the ever-growing influence of Rome in the area. In later republican times the city itself is hardly mentioned, but under the empire a is frequently mentioned in inscriptions. Of these several were found upon the Civitucola hill. The settlement continued to exist until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, after which all traces of it were lost. It was not until the pioneering work of Pierluigi Galletti in the mid-18th century that Capena's former location was identified. Even then, it took more than a hundred years for other historians to reach a consensus that Galletti had been correct. Recent archaeological studies have revealed that ancient Capena may have retained a vibrant urban life and some degree of regional significance for longer than had previously been believed. Medieval and modern ages The site of present-day Capena has been inhabited intermittently since prehistoric times and archaeological finds dating from the seventh century BC indicate that the inhabitants used a distinctive alphabet (now called the Capena-Leprignano alphabet by philologists) for inscriptions written in the Faliscan language. Continuous habitation began in the 11th century AD, when the Benedictine monastery of Saint Paul – now usually referred to as the Palazzo dei Monaci (Palace of the Monks) – was established on the tuff outcrop known as ‘la