Pontecorvo

The name comes from the pons curvus, the curved bridge over the Liri that still stands in the middle of the town: the curve was there to deflect the logs the floods dragged downstream, so that they would not strike the piers. Popular etymology, however, preferred to read into it the corvo, the crow, which was the symbol of the black monks of Montecassino, in whose Terra Sancti Benedicti Pontecorvo lay; and on the municipal coat of arms today there is, sure enough, a crow above a curved bridge.

On that same shield there is also a set of initials: S.P.Q.F., Senatus PopulusQue Fregellanus. From the sixteenth century a firm tradition had it that Pontecorvo was born from the ruins of Fregellae, the Latin colony founded in 328 BC and destroyed by Rome in 125 BC after the revolt of Marcus Fulvius Flaccus: even the bull with which Benedict XIII founded the diocese, in 1725, describes the town as having risen «ex ruinis veterum Fregellarum». Archaeological research in the second half of the twentieth century, however, has located Fregellae elsewhere, at Le Cese, between Arce, Ceprano and San Giovanni Incarico, where the forum and the residential quarters have come to light. The initials, on the arms, have stayed. In 1190 Pontecorvo was among the first communities in central and southern Italy to give itself a communal statute.