Monte San Giovanni Campano

The name comes from a Benedictine monastery founded at the beginning of the sixth century on the slope of the San Marco hill and dedicated to Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist: tradition holds it was founded by Benedict of Norcia himself, who is said to have destroyed a temple of Janus on the nearby Colianese. The adjective Campano, however, has nothing to do with Campania: it comes from the town's long belonging to the papal province of Campagna e Marittima. On the origin of the settlement the local historians disagree: for one it grew under the name of Castelforte around the castle, at the end of the tenth century, in the great movement of medieval castle-building; for another it goes back to the fifth century, when the people of the Roman city of Cereate moved to a safer place. The comune lies in the Ernici mountains and runs from north to south down to the hills that slope towards the Sacco valley, skirted by the river Liri.

The castle dates from the end of the tenth century, and on 8 April 1157 it passed to the counts of Aquino, vassals of pope Adrian the Fourth. There, between 1244 and 1245, Thomas Aquinas was held prisoner by his own family, who wanted to turn him from his Dominican vocation and have him enter the Benedictines as his father had planned: the room in which he was shut up is now a chapel. In 1440 the castle went to the Spanish marquis Innico d'Avalos, who had married Antonella d'Aquino, and in 1495 it was destroyed by the troops of Charles the Eighth of France. It returned to the Papal State in 1595 as the governor's seat; the earthquakes of 1703 and of 13 January 1915 forced the demolition of three of its floors, and restoration began in 1942 to be taken up again after 1990. In the early nineteen-hundreds Pietro Mascagni stayed there and left his fortepiano as a gift, still to be seen. In 1867, during the campaign of the Agro Romano, some thirty Garibaldian volunteers barricaded in the casina Valentini held out for hours against four hundred papal soldiers, and in the end broke through the encirclement.