Guarcino

In 1186 the army of Henry VI, son of Barbarossa, had laid siege to Guarcino, and the affair ended in a way that now sounds like fiction: a local knight named Malpensa challenged a soldier of the imperial army to a duel beneath the walls, won, and the town was spared destruction and sack. A bronze sculpture in piazza Umberto I recalls the scene. In the same square there is a second statue, that of Bonetto Floridi, a Guarcino nobleman of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who was consul, left for the eighth crusade and commanded the town's militia in the war against Fiuggi — won as well. Two monuments to two men who kept the town standing by fighting, and neither of them was a lord.

Guarcino lies at 625 metres on a spur of the Ernici mountains and has always been known as a place rich in water: the river Cosa rises in its territory, fed by two springs at different heights, Caporelle at 934 metres and Capo Cosa a little above eleven hundred. Behind it rises Campocatino, a plateau around eighteen hundred metres surrounded by peaks above two thousand, fully exposed to the damp western currents and therefore among the snowiest places in the Apennines; there are ski lifts and, since 1987, an astronomical observatory. On the ridge, finally, still stand the boundary stones that marked the border between the Papal State and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: two states that no longer exist, and their line of stone is still there.