Castro dei Volsci

Until 1816 the place was called Castrum Sancti Petri, or Castrum Castri; when in that year Filippo III Colonna gave up his feudal rights, it was left simply Castro, and in 1872 dei Volsci was added so as not to confuse it with the others. Up at Montenero, abandoned now, there is a circuit of enormous stone blocks set edgewise without mortar, in the technique of southern Lazio: it is Volscian work, but the wall was so far out of ordinary scale that the story was handed down from generation to generation that a race of giants had lived there. Then came the Roman villas — at Casale one has been uncovered inside a large bath complex, near a sulphur spring — and the necropolis of a Germanic people, rare evidence for a period of Lazio's history that is almost blank.

Under the Colonna, from the early fifteenth century, the people of Castro followed the family into the war against pope Paul IV and to Lepanto behind Marcantonio II; in the Napoleonic period the village became instead one of the centres of brigandage, in the safe triangle between Castro, Sonnino and Vallecorsa on the frontier of the Papal State. Liberation came in May 1944, after roundups, deportations and shootings by the retreating Germans; and on the Rocca dei Colonna, since 1964, stands the Monument to the Ciociara Mother by Fedele Andreani, a mother in Carrara marble trying to shield her daughter with her own body: Castro was one of the comuni of the Ciociaria worst hit by the mass violence committed by units of the French colonial contingent. Then, on 1 November 1968, a shell went off in the village cemetery: it was an American 155 millimetre round, put there years before as an ornament for the war memorial and still full of TNT, probably set off by a votive candle pushed into the cavity of the fuse. Four people were killed and seventeen injured.