Arienzo

Arienzo is a town built twice by displaced people. At the end of the ninth century the war between Lombards and Saracens burned down the city of Suessola, and some of its inhabitants took refuge higher up, at a castle on Monte Argentarium; when in 1135 king Roger II of Hauteville had that pulled down too, the people came down to the valley and in 1154 founded the first nucleus of the settlement, which was called Terra Murata. It was a rectangular citadel with walls, battlements, ramparts and towers, divided into sixteen equal blocks which today are fourteen: the walls were demolished from 1800 onwards, but the plan can still be read, and it is one of the clearest examples of a Norman foundation town left in Italy.

The town lies on the Via Appia, and of the Appia it keeps a remarkable piece: in the hamlet of Costa, 300 metres from the ancient road, a Roman rest station was discovered in 1961, with basins, columns, mosaic floors and walls scratched with drawings of circus life. Horace speaks of that place in the fifth satire of his first book, telling of the journey he made with Maecenas from Rome towards Brindisi to reconcile Mark Antony and Octavian. Eighteen centuries later another traveller stopped here to feel better: Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori, bishop of Sant'Agata de' Goti, who chose the bishop's palace of Arienzo for its healthier air and lived there permanently from 1767 to 1775.