Beneath the village lies Marruvium, the capital of the Marsi, which Roman inscriptions call «splendidissima civitas Marsorum Marruvium» and which Strabo and Pliny name among the flourishing municipia. Parts of the walls and of the amphitheatre remain, a domus, the Morroni, which are masonry funerary monuments, and the façade of the former cathedral of Santa Sabina, which held the first seat of the diocese of the Marsi until 1580, when a bull of Gregory XIII moved it to Pescina: from that day the town lost its religious and administrative weight.
In the eleventh century the monastery of San Benedetto di Civita was among Montecassino's most important possessions, so much so that it was depicted on the bronze door abbot Desiderius had made in 1065 for the renewed monastery. Then two things remade the village: the draining of Lake Fucino, which gave land to cultivate and multiplied the inhabitants, and the Marsica earthquake of 1915, which destroyed almost everything and forced a twentieth-century rebuilding. It is the flattest comune of the Marsica, with barely fifty metres of difference in height, and in 2022 it was raised to the rank of city.
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📅 Every year, on the first Sunday of June
San Benedetto dei Marsi celebrates its patron, Saint Vincent Ferrer, on the first Sunday of June; the following Monday, co-patron Saint Benedict of Nursia is celebrated.
📅 Every year, on the Monday after the first Sunday of June
San Benedetto dei Marsi celebrates co-patron Saint Benedict of Nursia on the Monday after the first Sunday of June, right after the feast of Saint Vincent Ferrer.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Benedetto dei Marsi, but an easy day trip away.
