Arnara

In his will of 1264 count Landolfo of Ceccano left goods to his wife Maccalona and wrote that she should dispose of them as she pleased, passing them to whichever of the children she liked best — secundum quod ipsa voluerit, according to what she herself should want. On her death, Maccalona left Arnara to one of her sons, Annibaldo; and from him comes that branch of the counts of Ceccano which afterwards took the name Annibaleschi. The village had come into that family by the will of an earlier count, Giovanni, drawn up on the fifth of April 1224, in which Arnara appears among the bequests to his firstborn son together with Ceccano, Patrica and other fiefs. The source has the care to add, however, that Gregorovius tells the succession in another way.

Almost everything known about medieval Arnara comes from the Chronicle of Fossanova, and that chronicle is honest about its own gaps. It records that in 1121 the fief was besieged by the troops of pope Callixtus the second and by the Normans, to punish the counts of Ceccano for favouring the emperor. It records that in 1143 the keep fell — and says that the fall may be attributed either to the contest between king Roger and pope Innocent the second, or to an earthquake. It records that in 1165 the Normans attacked hard and that Arnara held out, forcing the pope's allies to withdraw. And it records that in 1167 the town burned again, without explaining why. On the name, then, nobody agrees: some derive it from the Latin for sand, because the first houses stood on tufa quarries; some from a Lombard personal name; some from the alder tree; and some, more probably, from a word meaning an enclosed place — a cave, or a pit dug in the earth. Which fits, because there is a reading according to which this village exists precisely because its tufa was quarried, in the sixth century, to build the walls of Ceccano.