The landscape of the area is volcanic - hills interspersed with wooded gorges, deeply imbedded rivers, hot springs, ancient villages and towns on rocky tuff.

Via Francigena, the great medieval pilgrimage route, which led from the English cathedral city of Canterbury through Switzerland and France to Rome, still runs alongside Capranica’s town walls and precipitous escarpments, just below them, and pilgrims still walk along it today.

Capranica lies in the historic area of Tuscia, which is the ancient name for Southern Etruria, the land of the Etruscans and the heartland of the greatest civilisation in pre-Roman and early Roman Italy (9th-3rd century BC).

Although these and other fascinating and evocative Etruscan places are within easy reach from Capranica, nothing has yet been found in the town itself although its position, on the brow of the only link between southern and central Etruria, was of strategic importance.

Legend has it that in the 8th century AD goatherds from the village of Vicus Matrini fled a Lombard invasion and settled on the tuff hill, which they chose for the safety, beauty and healthy air it offered.

Francesco Petrarca, in English known as Petrarch (1304–1374), a scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists, spent a month in Capranica as a guest of the noble House of Anguillara and wrote of bold farmers there who, as they worked their fields, always had a sword and a spear lying in the furrows ready to defend themselves and their homes.

Echoes of the French Revolution (1789–99) reached the area and caused unrest and destruction in nearby towns of Ronciglione, Bassano Romano and Monterano but Capranica was not affected.

As all this was happening, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 –1872) politician, journalist and activist for the unification of Italy, and an advocate of a United States of Europe a century before the European Union began to take shape, passed through Capranica on his way to Rome and expressed much admiration for the volcanic landscape and the Etruscan rock tombs alongside the road.