Atina

Virgil calls it Atina potens, Atina the powerful, and in the Aeneid places it among the cities that made ready arms in aid of Turnus against Aeneas; legend credits its foundation to Saturn in the golden age, together with five other Latin cities whose names begin with A. History gives instead a Volscian town, later part of the Samnite league, standing on the road between Sora and Casinum and close to the iron mines of Monte Meta. Cicero wrote that Atina was the mother of so many illustrious men that no city in Italy could be called richer. From that age remain stretches of polygonal walls, datable between the seventh and the second century before Christ.

Destroyed by the Lombards and rebuilt in 626, by the year eight hundred it was already a bishop's see, as a diploma of Charlemagne describes. In 1349 an earthquake brought it down again: the Palazzo Cantelmo, today the town hall, was built after that quake on the spot where the d'Aquino fortress had stood, and above its doorway a Roman relief is set into the wall. The iron of the Meta came back more than once: a forge at the sanctuary of Canneto from 1774, closed in 1799 during the French occupation, and a Bourbon ironworks at Rosanisco whose construction stopped with the Piedmontese occupation of 1861. In 1845 the Visocchi opened a paper mill, and later a hydroelectric station on the Melfa.