Civita d'Antino

Under today's village lies the Marsian city of Antinum, which in Roman times became an important municipium. Stretches of its walls in polygonal work can still be seen, and a gateway of the same kind, the Porta Campanile, which still serves as the way into the village: you enter Civita passing under a threshold built before the Romans. The inscriptions found here speak of the populus Antinatium Marsorum and confirm that the city was Marsian, but one has also turned up in the Oscan language and in the Volscian dialect, and that suggests the Volsci were here before the Marsi. In the middle ages the borgo was called Antena, and here was born the Benedictine saint Lidano, who went off to drain the Pontine marshes.

Then, from 1877, the Danes began to arrive. Kristian Zahrtmann, Peder Severin Krøyer and Peter Christian Skovgaard came up here in summer to paint, and ended by founding in the village a real summer school of painting, which lasted into the early twentieth century: out of it came pictures of the landscape, of daily life, of feasts and of local costume. The century, though, presented its bill. Among the miners of the Roveto valley who died in 1907 at Monongah, in West Virginia, there were men from here; the Marsica earthquake of 1915 caused thirty-nine deaths in Civita, and it was the Danish writer Johannes Jørgensen who told of it; the young men who escaped the earthquake left for the first world war, and thirty-two did not come back; in the second, the bombardments killed eighteen civilians.