Casalvieri

The coat of arms of Casalvieri has never had a formal decree of concession, and the comune uses it all the same: it shows the civic tower crowned by a phoenix, with a Latin motto beneath — ut in aeternum vivat, «so that it may live for ever» — the whole enclosed in an oval surmounted by a crown and adorned with two sprigs, of laurel and of oak. A bird that is reborn from its own ashes and a wish for eternity, on a blazon that officially does not exist. The village stands at the point where the valley of Comino enters the middle valley of the Liri through a narrow passage, and that position made it change hands often: the name is attested from 1017, a castle of the county is mentioned in the middle of the eleventh century, and shortly afterwards the place belonged to the abbey of Montecassino together with two small convents. From 1583 to 1796 it was a fief of the Boncompagni, under whom several mills were built along the river.

The sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Rose, declared a national monument, was begun on the twentieth of April 1636 to replace a chapel that had been built on the spot where, so the story goes, the Madonna appeared in a rose garden to a little mute girl who was pasturing sheep, and who after the apparition recovered her speech. The building has been damaged by four earthquakes. In the mother church, built in the course of the eighteenth century, the body of the martyr saint Onorio, the village's patron, has rested since 1747 in a gilded wooden urn. The population grew all through the nineteenth century until it reached seven thousand, and then emptied out: emigration took the people away, above all between the thirties and the sixties, and today there are fewer than three thousand left. In 1915 the earthquake of Avezzano reached here too, and during the Second World War the village suffered occupation and heavy bombing.