Civitella Roveto

The village was called Petrarolo until it appears as Civitella in a document of 1061; in the seventeenth century it became Civitella della Valle, and only a century later Civitella Roveto. Its arms carry a column, the emblem of the Colonna, dukes of Tagliacozzo, who held it after the county of Albe. The old nucleus stands on the western bank of the Liri, while the modern town, on the other side, was built after the Marsica earthquake of 1915. At dawn on the twenty-fourth of June, for the patronal feast, the faithful still gather on the banks of the river for the rite of ablution; and the five-spouted fountain of Auta was built in the nineteenth century in three parts: to water the animals, to wash, and to drink.

In December 1907, in the mine disaster of Monongah — the worst in the history of the United States — many miners from this valley died, emigrants who had gone to work underground. On the first of May 1944 the brothers Mario and Bruno Durante, two young partisans, were captured by the Nazis in the hamlet of Meta: they refused to reveal that they had a third brother, also a partisan, and to admit the help the people here were giving to Allied prisoners escaped from the Abruzzo camps. They were killed after a month of torture and their bodies were never found. Enrico Mattei, the founder of ENI, spent his childhood and part of his youth here, and stayed attached to the village: a few years after the body was founded, in 1953, more than a hundred and fifty inhabitants were taken on by it.