Baia e Latina

The comune is made of two boroughs that were separate for centuries. Baia would come from vaiarulo, once pronounced «vaìa»; Latina comes instead from Tina, a word to which the article attached itself over time — 'a Tina, and then Latina. In the coat of arms are two letters L, found carved decades ago on a mutilated slab, which some read as a Latina Legio, a Roman legion camped here: a whole hypothesis hanging on two letters and a broken stone. The name appears in a document in 979. The married comune, though, is of French making: the law of the fourth of May 1811 joined the two boroughs that the reform of 1806 still kept apart, and placed them in the district of Formicola. There followed a protest by the mayor and the citizens, because there were no roads at all by which to reach the district capital; it took years, but Ferdinand the Second gave way and by decree of the sixth of June 1832 moved the comune to the district of Pietramelara.

In 1858 the citizens of Latina formally asked to be separated from Baia, because the latter — the words are theirs — «lords it over the communal revenues without caring at all for the interests of the aggregated village». After a controversial bureaucratic course the request was rejected, but the district authorities approved a proposal of conciliation meant to establish equal attention, duties and rights for the two boroughs. What divided them again, for a few days, was the war: under the German occupation Baia housed the local command in palazzo Borelli and Latina the field hospital in palazzo Pieretti, and on the nineteenth of October 1943 American aircraft bombed both villages, destroying much of them and razing the parish church of Santo Stefano, which the Germans had turned into an ammunition store. That same day the Americans entered Latina; to enter Baia, four kilometres away, they needed three more days.