Fontana Liri

The village stands on a hill and its railway station stands at the foot of the hill, and between the two there are three hundred and sixty-five steps — one for every day of the year — climbing a hundred and thirty-seven metres along a path everyone here calls le scalette. The station was opened in 1891, when the stretch of line between Arce and Sora came into service, and it stayed open until 2012. The ground is so steep that, in order to give the track enough length for trains to stop, a stone viaduct had to be built across the valley on seven arches. Lower down there is a second stop, Fontana Liri Inferiore, which began as a very simple goods siding serving the gunpowder works of the comune and was opened to passengers in 1938.

The name comes from a spring called Fontana Abballe, which still runs; «Liri» was added in the eighteen-sixties, from the river that crosses the territory to the south, to distinguish the comune from other places of the same name. And this village of fewer than three thousand people gave Italy two Mastroianni: Marcello, the actor, and Umberto, the sculptor, one of whose works stands in the main square of the lower village; the engraver Ernesto Nino Palleschi was from here too. In the upper village Nino Manfredi shot the opening scenes of Per grazia ricevuta. The sanctuary of Maria Santissima di Loreto, on the other hand, was born of a legend: about the middle of the seventeenth century a woman passing before a little chapel is said to have seen three drops of blood appear on the fresco of the Madonna and Child; the cult began then, and the sanctuary built in the following decades still keeps that fresco.