Picinisco

Picinisco stands on a rocky height at seven hundred and twenty-five metres, on the western side of monte Meta, and almost all of its territory lies inside the national park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise; it is also one of the five comuni of Lazio that border on more than one region other than their own. On the name nobody agrees: some bring it from a Saracen captain called Pecenesco, some from the pica, the bird sacred to Mars, some from pico, a cypress-like tree that grew in these parts; in the documents one reads Piczinisci, Castro Piceno, Placiniscum, Picinesto, and today's form settles only after 1700. The first document is of 1017, when the princes of Capua granted to Montecassino the church of San Valentino, which stood «in the territory of Piczinisci»; the castle came in 1054, at the hands of the counts of Marsi.

This village, though, is better known in Scotland than in Italy. Picinisco is, together with Barga in Tuscany, one of the two places from which more than six out of ten Italian Scots descend: Crolla, Capaldi, Pacitti, DiCiacca, Arcari, Boni, Coppola, Tartaglia are surnames from here, and the descendants come back constantly, as visitors or to stay. What emptied the hamlets was the economic crisis after the war, but the village had already been through worse: between 1941 and 1943 it was one of the comuni of Lazio assigned to civil internment, and refugees of various nationalities were sent here, among them about fifteen Jews. After 8 September 1943 Picinisco found itself on the Gustav line: German occupation, evacuation, bombardment, until the liberation on the morning of 29 May 1944 by the Italian Liberation Corps. Not one of the Jews interned here appears in the lists of the deported.