Fontechiari

Until 1862 this village was called Schiavi, and in medieval documents it appears as Universitas Sclavi: the name came from groups of Slavs who had arrived from Schiavonia and settled here. With the proclamation of unity the occasion was taken to change it, and the name chosen was that of a spring recorded in 1732 as Fons Clara: Fontechiari. The first settlement, though, had been born much earlier, as a Benedictine monastic cell dependent on Montecassino, and around that cell a curtis had grown: houses, mills, cultivated land, a rural community organised under the abbot's authority. Of that world there remain in the village the walls, the towers, the ruins of the medieval church of San Giovanni Battista, the hanging gardens, a cistern later swallowed into a tower and an old hospitium, where pilgrims and those who had nothing were taken in.

Two things here are found nowhere else. The first is the hermitage of Sant'Onofrio, frequented perhaps as early as the ninth or tenth century: a wide cave divided into three rooms, with graffiti outside that take up Christian symbols — the bird, the peacock, the ladder — and, inside, an altar entirely frescoed with the anchorite saint and eight panels telling his life. The second is the Napoleonic cemetery, a monument unique in the whole of central Italy: the plan, of 1836, is still kept in the village's historical archive. A burial ground was needed, and the Napoleonic model was chosen, with the addition of a ring of family chapels around the three holes in the ground into which the dead were lowered. Under the mound there is still an empty and perfectly ventilated chamber: it was the ossuary.