Ausonia

Until 1862 this village was called Le Fratte. Then it took the name of a city that has not existed for more than two thousand years: Ausona, the city of the Ausones-Aurunci, one of the five of the Auruncan pentapolis. Allied with the people of Capua, it was destroyed by the Romans in 314 before Christ and its inhabitants put to the sword; after that massacre it never rose again, and to this day nobody can say for certain where it stood. Of that world there remain in the territory Latin inscriptions of imperial date dedicated to Hercules, which some scholars connect to an ancient processional way of the demigod's cult, still partly traceable, that came down from Ausona to the Tyrrhenian coast towards Minturno. The medieval village, the castrum Fractarum, arose on lands that from the tenth century belonged to the duchy of Gaeta and appears in the documents of the abbey of Montecassino from the eleventh. And there is an episode with a fine name: in 846 a Saracen fleet laid siege to Gaeta, and the besiegers camped near here, at a place called ad duos leones, to control the roads southward.

Hercules, though, never entirely left. The collegiate church of San Michele Arcangelo, the village's oldest monument, was built in white stone between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century over the remains of a temple dedicated to him, and the altars and cippi of that temple can still be seen inside the church: at the entrance two funerary altars serve as holy-water stoups, and restoration brought to light, set into the second and fourth pillars on the right, an altar with a club and a lion skin, that is the demigod's emblems, plus a cippus with the same symbols on its sides. Not far off, the sanctuary of Santa Maria del Piano stands in its turn on a pagan temple, perhaps of the goddess Concordia, and keeps the funerary monument of the humanist Elisio Calenzio, born here. In the Second World War the village lay on the Gustav line, broken through on the eighteenth of May 1944, and like many other places along that front its people suffered the mass violence that went into history under the name of the marocchinate, committed by troops of the French expeditionary corps.