Coreno Ausonio

Coreno Ausonio has no old town: it has rioni, and each of them grew around a single farmstead that widened one room at a time as the family grew, so much so that the rioni still bear the names of the families that built them. It is a village made of houses called after people, and that makes the reckoning of 1656 harder to read. In that year the plague arrived and the priest Francesco Ruggiero noted it down day by day: people began to die in May one at a time, on 20 June three died, and from then on fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four a day, until 16 August, when seven died «and no more». The final count is 537 deaths in bed, recorded, and 234 deaths in the countryside that nobody wrote down: 771 people out of one thousand and eighty-five. There remained 314, fifty-three empty houses, and one whole hamlet, that of the Lormi, with nobody left in it.

The other thing counted here is stone. The local limestone, sold today as Perlato Royal Coreno, has been quarried since Roman times: it went into the via Appia, into the columns and the streets of Pompeii, into the amphitheatre of Minturnae and, much later, into the abbey of Montecassino. The village, in other words, is inside half the architectural history of southern Lazio, and meanwhile it cannot explain its own name: the word Coreno appears in a diploma of Charlemagne of 787, which speaks of a Villa Coreni, but where it comes from nobody knows. Some bring in the goddess Kore, some an ancient Corenius, some the club of Hercules, some the Greek for «land of wine» — and the vines, which would support that guess, are today almost all abandoned.