Arce

Arce has 5,783 inhabitants on the hills of the middle Liri valley. The name comes from the Latin arx, a fortress, or from Arcanum, the mountain the town lies on, and the first document to record it is the Cosmographia of the Anonymous of Ravenna, of the seventh century. It was a place worth taking, and everybody took it: the Lombards of Benevento in 702, the Saracens twice in the ninth century, the Magyars in 937, then the monks of Montecassino, the Normans, Henry VI, Frederick II, Charles of Anjou. Later it found itself on the border between the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal State, a border marked here by fourteen boundary stones.

In May 1849 Garibaldi and his men came through, and a plaque on the front of the town hall records it. What happened here, though, is worth more than the plaque: answering Mazzini, who was asking him to suspend operations in the Kingdom, the General said "obbedisco", I obey. It is the same word that made him famous seventeen years later at Bezzecca, when he accepted the order to withdraw from the Trentino; but the first time he said it was here. War came back in 1944, when Allied troops arriving from Cassino put an end to the German occupation after the battle of Monte Grande and Monte Piccolo.