Calvi Risorta

Here stood Cales, the city of the Aurunci that became a Roman colony in 335 before Christ and then grew famous for its pottery: the Calene vases. The Saracens destroyed it in 879, the Lombard Atenulf rebuilt it with walls, but the final blow came much later, with the plague of 1656: the inhabitants left for the nearby hamlets, Zuni, Petrulo and Visciano, a mile away. Out of those three hamlets joined together came today's municipality, and the name says so: Calvi Risorta, Calvi risen again.

On the eighteenth of October 1943 the village was to be bombed by the Americans, who still believed there was a German position there; but the fifty-sixth British infantry division had just taken it, and the radios were not working. The British entrusted the message to a carrier pigeon, G.I. Joe, who covered twenty miles in twenty minutes and arrived just in time to stop the bombers. For that flight, in 1946, he received the Dickin Medal at the Tower of London: he was the first non-British animal to be given it.