Anagni: The Town That Slapped a Pope

Anagni is a hill town of about 21,000 people in the province of Frosinone, roughly 70 kilometers southeast of Rome, and for a century in the Middle Ages it was one of the places where Europe was governed. Four popes were born here. A fifth episode made the town famous in a way it did not choose: in September 1303, a pope was taken prisoner in his own palace by soldiers working for the king of France.

What was the Outrage of Anagni?

On September 7, 1303, Boniface VIII, who had excommunicated Philip the Fair of France, was seized in Anagni by French emissaries, among them Sciarra Colonna of the Roman family that had been at war with the pope for years. He was held in the palace for a few days until the people of Anagni drove the soldiers out. He returned to Rome and died that autumn.

The episode is remembered in Italian as lo schiaffo di Anagni, the slap of Anagni, from the story that Sciarra Colonna struck the pope in the face. Treccani, the Italian national encyclopedia, calls the insult legendary, which is the careful way of saying that the capture is documented and the slap is what people told afterward. Dante, writing within a decade, saw the scene as the worst thing a Christian king had done: the fleur-de-lis entering Anagni, and Christ made captive in the person of his vicar.

For a traveler, the useful part is that the room is still there, and so is the town around it.

Why four popes came from one small town

Anagni was already a capital before Rome existed as a power. It was Anagnia, the chief town of the Hernici, an Italic people the Romans defeated in 306 BC. In the Middle Ages the surrounding hills belonged to a small number of baronial families, and two of them, the Conti and the Caetani, produced pope after pope: Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV and Boniface VIII were all born here. Popes also came to Anagni to get out of Rome, which was hot, factional and often dangerous, and the town became a summer capital of the papacy with the buildings to match.

That is the reason a place this size has a cathedral of that quality, and it explains the local sense of history, which is longer than the town is big.

The crypt under the cathedral

The cathedral of Santa Maria was rebuilt from the end of the eleventh century and is one of the important Romanesque and Gothic buildings in Lazio. Inside there is a Cosmatesque floor laid by master Cosma around 1231, and a ciborium, a candelabrum and an episcopal throne by Pietro Vassalletto from about 1263.

The reason to come is underneath. The crypt of San Magno was built between 1072 and 1104 under Bishop Pietro da Salerno, and its vaults and walls, about 540 square meters of them, are covered with a painted cycle made in the middle of the thirteenth century by three different workshops. Treccani calls it one of the most complete painted cycles of the period. Locally it is called the Sistine Chapel of the Middle Ages, which is a marketing phrase, but the scale is real: creation, the history of salvation, the saints, the sciences and the end of time, all of it legible, all of it in one low room lit from nowhere.

Practical, and this matters here more than in most places. The museum and crypt are open from 9 to 1 and from 3 to 6 from November through March, and from 9 to 1 and from 3 to 7 from April through October, with last entry an hour before closing and the ticket office closed on Sunday mornings between 10:30 and 3. Full price was 10 euros in 2026. Booking is required. Inside the crypt the lights run on fixed turns, morning and afternoon, and stay on for 20 minutes at a time: you are admitted for your turn, and when the lights go off you leave. Plan to be there at the start of a turn rather than the end.

The palace where it happened

The Palazzo di Bonifacio VIII stands a short walk from the cathedral, a thirteenth century building of dark stone with a vaulted hall known as the Sala delle Scacchiere, the room of the chessboards, after the pattern painted on its walls. It is also called the Sala dello Schiaffo, the room of the slap, because this is where the pope was held. The visit is short, the ticket was 5 euros in 2026 with an audio guide, and the interest is entirely in standing in the room.

The rest of the town

Anagni is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes and old enough that the walk takes an hour. The main street runs along the ridge between the cathedral at one end and the medieval town hall at the other, with dark stone arches over side lanes and a view south over the valley. There is no traffic in the center, no line at anything, and, on a weekday in spring, very little English spoken.

September brings a costumed re-enactment of the events of 1303, which the town takes more seriously than you would expect. Check the dates before counting on it.

How to get to Anagni from Rome

By car it is about an hour, leaving the A1 motorway at the exit named Anagni-Fiuggi and climbing for a few kilometers.

By train, the station called Anagni-Fiuggi sits on the Rome to Naples line via Cassino, and regional trains from Rome Termini take roughly an hour. The station is down on the plain, about eight kilometers below the old town, and a local bus runs up from the station square for about a euro. Check the connection before you travel: the buses are timed for residents, not for visitors.

Anagni pairs naturally with Fiuggi, twelve kilometers away, where the springs and the parks make an easy afternoon after a morning of frescoes. The rest of the hill towns are in our guide to Lazio beyond Rome, and the region they belong to is explained in our guide to Ciociaria.

Is Anagni worth a day?

Half a day, honestly, unless you sit down for lunch and let the afternoon go, which is the correct way to use it. It is one of the places that makes the case for southern Lazio: forty minutes off the motorway from Rome, with a room where a pope was held prisoner and a crypt that art historians travel for, and no crowd in either.

That is the kind of stop our journey in Ciociaria is built from, and our Ciociaria page shows where these towns sit in relation to each other. If you want a trip built around the medieval Lazio nobody puts on a list, tell us in Design your trip.