Castellafiume

The name is the Latin Castrum fluminis, the castle on the river: the Liri, at the point where the Rio Sonno joins it. The historian Muzio Febonio, in his Historiae Marsorum, wrote that the castle had been built near a little church dedicated to San Benedetto at Pascusano, given in the second half of the eleventh century to the monks of Montecassino; but that property is now placed almost certainly elsewhere, among the casali that grew around the castle of Meta, in the middle of the Roveto valley — though Benedictines really were in the territory of Castellafiume. Around the castle, upstream of the river, the shepherds and the people of the Nerfa valley gathered, and from there the village was born. Under the mountain that stands above it, monte Arunzo, runs instead an underground channel devised by the consul Lucius Arruntius and built between 41 and 54 after Christ, in the same years as the tunnels of Claudius.

In the twelfth century Castellafiume counted for something: in the catalogue of the Barons it is cited as the fief of no fewer than four knights, divided into two parts between Oderisio da Verrecchie and Bonaventura di Tagliacozzo. Around 1278, some ten years after defeating Conradin of Swabia at Tagliacozzo, Charles I of Anjou gave the church of Castellafiume to the Cistercian abbey of Santa Maria della Vittoria at Scurcola Marsicana, whose abbot had powers very like a bishop's. In the fourteenth century the village passed to the Orsini, who held it more than a hundred years, and then to the Colonna. With the abolition of the fiefs, in 1806, Castellafiume became a frazione of Cappadocia, and it took until 1830 for it to get its own administration back, together with the little settlement of Pagliara dei Marsi. The Marsica earthquake of 1915 struck it hard and killed eighteen people. Its arms, which the comune uses although it was never formally granted them, carry a crowned lion holding up with its forepaws a battlemented tower.