Ancient mythology connected the origin of Praeneste to Ulysses, or to other fabled characters such as Caeculus, Telegonus, Erulus or Praenestus.

Of the objects found in the oldest graves, and supposed to date from about the 7th century BC, the cups of silver and silver-gilt and most of the gold and amber jewelry are Phoenician (possibly Carthaginian), but the bronzes and some of the ivory articles seem to be of the Etruscan civilization.

It withdrew from the league in 499 BC, according to Livy (its earliest historical mention), and formed an alliance with Rome, the action which led to a battle between the latter and thirty Latin states.

Also famous is the bronze Ficoroni Cista[7] (Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome), engraved with pictures of the arrival of the Argonauts in Bithynia and the victory of Pollux over Amycus, found in 1738.

When the city was captured, Marius slew himself, the male inhabitants were massacred in cold blood, and a military colony was settled on part of its territory.

[8] Under the Empire the cool breezes of Praeneste made it a favourite summer resort of wealthy Romans, whose villas studded the neighbourhood, though they ridiculed the language and the rough manners of the native inhabitants.

Praeneste was chiefly famed for its great Temple of Fortuna Primigenia connected with the oracle known as the Praenestine lots (sortes praenestinae).

[13] The buildings of the forum comprised a central temple, whose walls were re-used for the cathedral, and a two-storey civil basilica consisting of four naves separated by columns, once roofed but today an open space.

The basilica was flanked by two buildings, the easternmost containing a raised podium (suggestus)[14] and the public treasury, the aerarium, identified by an inscription dating it to ~150 BC.

[17] In 1437 the rebuilt city was captured by Giovanni Vitelleschi, a condottiero in the service of the papacy, and once more utterly destroyed at the command of Pope Eugenius IV.

Thereafter, the famously nepotistic family, headed by Maffeo Barberini (later Pope Urban VIII), treated the comune as a principality in its own right.

During the reign of Urban VIII, the title became interchangeable with that of Commander of the Papal Army (Gonfalonier of the Church) as the Barberini family controlled the papacy and the Palestrina principality.

The centre of the city was destroyed by Allied bombings during World War II, but that brought the ancient remains of the sanctuary to light.

The town came to largely obscure the temple, the monumental remains of which were revealed as a result of American bombing of German positions in World War II.

On the summit of the hill at 753 metres (2,470 ft), nearly 1.6 kilometres (1 mi) from the town, stood the ancient citadel, the site of which is now occupied by a few poor houses (Castel San Pietro) and a ruined medieval castle of the Colonna family.

A calendar, which according to Suetonius was set up by the grammarian Marcus Verrius Flaccus in the imperial forum of Praeneste (at the Madonna dell'Aquila), was discovered in 1771 in the ruins of the church of Saint Agapitus, where it had been used as building material.

[19] In Inferno, Dante makes reference to advice given by Guido da Montefeltro to Pope Boniface VIII to entice the surrender of Palestrina in 1298 by offering the Colonna family an amnesty.