Colfelice

Colfelice is a village designed twice by the same family, a century and a half apart. On the twelfth of September of 1579 pope Gregory XIII bought the duchy of Sora from the Della Rovere and entrusted it to his son Giacomo Boncompagni; and it was Giacomo who in 1583, taking an interest in developing the new property, ordered some buildings put up on the top of a small wooded hill and the area around it cleared, to favour the cultivation of the fields and the raising of animals. Things, however, did not go as planned: most probably for lack of money the few buildings begun were never finished and were abandoned. More than a century and a half passed before another Boncompagni took up his ancestor's project: in 1746 duke Gaetano had those works completed, had others built, and had the church raised beside them, dedicated — not by chance — to Saint Cajetan. Those palaces today frame the piazza del Duca.

The name, on the other hand, is of the twentieth century, and it is an acronym. Colfelice became an autonomous comune on the sixth of December of 1923, by a royal decree that detached from Roccadarce the two hamlets of Coldragone and Villafelice and joined them: the seat was fixed at Coldragone, which was more populous and had the railway station, and the official name was born from the union of COL, from Coldragone, and FELICE, from Villafelice. At the time the territory belonged to the Terra di Lavoro, in the province of Caserta and therefore in Campania; but that legal status did not last long, because on the second of January of 1927 the province of Frosinone was instituted and Colfelice, like the neighbouring villages, passed to Lazio. The arms set on a gold field a green dragon standing on the roof of a red house, founded on a hill. At the place called Camponi there is the little church of San Gaetano, built after the war to remember the liberation of May 1944, when the front passed through here.