Ponte

The name is a piece of engineering: a stone bridge built by the Romans to carry the via Latina over the Alenta stream, whose remains can still be seen along the watercourse. Medieval documents call the place ad Pontem Lapideum, «at the stone bridge», to tell it apart from the wooden footbridges over the same stream; and in a grant of the Lombard prince Pandolfo Capodiferro of 980 it appears as lucus Ponte Sancte Anastasie. From the fields of San Barbato comes a Samnite bronze fibula with a movable pin, derived from late Mycenaean models like those found in Crete and Cyprus.

The modern history of the village is that of a comune which had to rebuild itself from scratch. On the twelfth of June 1829 Ponte lost its autonomy and was attached to Casalduni; in 1892 it was detached from Casalduni and annexed to Paupisi instead. The discontent gave rise to a movement half a century long, backed by local notables and by the province's members of parliament, and it ended in the chamber: the bill presented on the seventh of June 1913 by the deputies Antonio Venditti and Leonardo Bianchi was approved, and Ponte became a comune again.