The Door of the Sun (Porta del Sole) in Palestrina was built in 1642 on the orders of the Barberini Princes and owes its name to the coat of arms bearing a sun, which was much loved by Pope Urban VIII.
The door is sited near the remains of the cyclopean ring of walls and the ancient Roman walls that encircled the city. The walls were made out of huge, heavy blocks of stone, held together without using mortar or cement: the ancients thought they were built by supernatural beings, the Cyclopes giants. The walls probably date back to the IV/V century BC and enclosed a large area, from the lower part of the contemporary city, along the Via degli Arcioni, rising up along two sides of the mountain to the acropolis of the ancient city, today know as Castel San Pietro Romano.
If you walk through the Door of the Sun and climb a few steps you reach Piazza Santa Maria degli Angeli square, which was once the location for a seventeenth century convent for the Farnesiane nuns and the Church of St. Mary of the Angels, which gave the square its name.
 

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