Acuto

Acuto stands at a little over seven hundred metres, on a ridge of the Ernici mountains, in a commanding position above the Sacco valley, and it was founded in the fifth century by people of Anagni fleeing an invasion — although the finds show that a small settlement was already there. The first precise source is of 1051 and speaks of a stronghold near Anagni, the Castrum Acuti. For centuries the fortress was held alternately by local lordlings and by the bishops of Anagni, until at the end of the thirteen hundreds it returned to the bishops for good; and from the fourteen hundreds on Acuto tied itself ever more closely to Anagni, so much so that in 1478 its inhabitants were also given the citizenship of Anagni, and with it the bond to the papacy.

Then the war came, and it went the opposite way to how it should have. In 1557 Spain declared war on the pope, and Anagni, together with other towns of the Campagna, was attacked by Marcantonio Colonna at the head of an army of Spanish soldiers, which destroyed Frosinone. During the siege the people of Acuto moved to Paliano, another stronghold nearby: and the Spanish destroyed Paliano too. The war ended with Spain's victory, and the one place that was not devastated was Acuto, which its inhabitants had left. From then on it had the upper hand over the neighbouring towns, and for centuries it clashed with Anagni, which kept trying to win back the supremacy it had lost; the quarrels ended only in 1806, and from that year a decline began for Acuto. Then came the French, from 1809, and after them a decade of brigandage; in 1870 the comune passed to the Kingdom of Italy. Here Maria de Mattias founded the congregation of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, and from here comes the astronaut Umberto Guidoni. In the thirteenth-century church of San Sebastiano there is a Madonna and Child by an anonymous sculptor whom scholars name after this very work: the Master of the Madonna of Acuto.