Cassino

This city has changed its name five times. The Romans called it Casinum, and the name — says Varro, who had his villa here — comes from the Oscan cascum, «ancient»: so much so that the Romans also called it Forum Vetus, the old forum. Then it became Castellum Sancti Petri; then Eulogimenopoli, which in Greek means «city of Saint Benedict»; then San Germano, and this because of a phrase: the church held the relics of Saint Germanus, bishop of Capua, and people would say imus ad Sanctum Germanum, «let us go to Saint Germanus», until the phrase became the name of the place. Only in 1863, under the Kingdom of Italy, did the town council decide to go back to Cassino.

On the mountain, around 529, Benedict founded among the ruins of the acropolis the mother abbey of Western monasticism. Montecassino has been destroyed four times: by the Lombards, by the Saracens who killed abbot Bertarius, by the earthquake and by the bombing of the war. And four times it has risen again. In its archive lie the four Placiti cassinesi, sworn depositions about the monastery's lands recorded around 963: they are the first official documents written in the Italian vernacular. At the foot of the hill, ancient Casinum has left the theatre, the amphitheatre and Varro's villa; and the church of the Crocefisso stands inside what was the tomb of Ummidia Quadratilla, an immensely rich woman whom Pliny the Younger describes as of masculine character and massive build, and who gave the city a temple and an amphitheatre. Until the war a cableway climbed from the town to the abbey in seven minutes, the first in the south: in the year nineteen forty-three a German fighter on a training flight cut one of its cables and died there. Then came the bombing: on the fifteenth of February 1944 the abbey was razed, and exactly a month later the town. Cassino was rebuilt from nothing, and holds the gold medal.