Bellona

The name comes from a temple of the goddess Bellona that stood here in Roman times. Through the gorge between Monte Castellone and Monte Grande, which they call Passo la Colla, Hannibal is said to have passed: tradition tells that he routed the Romans camped on the heights by driving a herd of oxen at them with burning horns. Before reaching Capua the Carthaginians stopped here to build a bridge over the Volturno; that bridge, still called Hannibal's bridge, was blown up in the Second World War, and its ruins can be seen in the water.

On the seventh of October 1943 the Germans gathered a hundred and fifty people of Bellona in the church of San Michele Arcangelo, saying they were needed for some work, and shot fifty-four of them in an abandoned tufa quarry: it was the reprisal for a German soldier killed by a local lad defending his sister. For this Bellona holds the gold medal for military valour. In 1928 the fascist regime had joined it to Vitulazio in a single municipality, Villa Volturno: it was dissolved on the twenty-seventh of April 1945, two days after the Liberation.