The village carries two names and two histories. San Biagio comes from the church; Saracinisco was added in the eighteen hundreds to recall the Saracens, though some trace it instead to the Caraceni, a pre-Roman tribe. The fact is this: after their defeat at the battle of the Garigliano, in 915, some Saracen bands took refuge in these mountains, and from there they were driven out by armed men from Sora. On the ridge people here call the Dead Man there is a group of graves, and it seems that those buried in them are precisely they. In the Chronicon of Leo Marsicanus the place appears as a defensive castle under the name Sarraciniscum; in 1055 the prince of Capua gave it to Montecassino, and the monks entrusted the land to seven families brought from Picinisco, Agnone and Atina, with the task of making it fertile.
It is a village that has emptied and filled again more than once. The plague of 1656 left it deserted, and twenty years passed before a few families came back; in 1874 cholera killed three hundred people, and in 1918 the Spanish flu another eighty. Then came the departures: around 1915 a quarter of the inhabitants left for Rome, Milan, Paris, Berlin; after 1960 half of them left for northern Europe, the United States, Brazil. Those who stayed keep the shepherding traditions alive, and at Christmas the bagpipers can still be heard.
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📅 Every year, on 3 February
On 3 February San Biagio Saracinisco celebrates its patron Saint Blaise, whose name also appears in the municipality's name: on the occasion some emigrants return.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Biagio Saracinisco, but an easy day trip away.
