San Donato Val di Comino

San Donato lies inside the national park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, at the point where one crosses from one slope to the other through the pass of Forca d'Acero. Its origins are traced to Cominium, a Samnite outpost destroyed by the armies of Rome in the third century before Christ, which is supposed to have stood in this valley. The first document that names the place is of 778, when the duke of Spoleto ceded the church and the territory of San Donato to the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. The village as it now is came later: after the battle of the Garigliano, in 915, the peoples of the Benevento country, of the Cassinate and of Itri went up towards the mountains between Lazio and Abruzzo, and out of their flight the villages of the Comino valley were born; when one of them, Sant'Urbano, broke up, part of its people settled around the old church of San Donato and walled themselves in. In 1862 the valley was added to the name, to tell the place apart from the other San Donatos.

Between 1940 and 1943 the fascist authorities designated San Donato as a place of civil internment for the foreign Jewish refugees who were in Italy. There were twenty-five of them, the largest group in Lazio: they lived in the village, in rooms rented in people's houses, had to report to the police twice a day, and made friends with the inhabitants. Among them were the intellectual Grete Bloch and the actress Grete Berger. After the eighth of September 1943, with the German occupation, everything changed. The village did what it could, going as far as having false identity papers made for them; but on the sixth of April 1944 sixteen of the twenty-five were arrested and taken to their deaths at Auschwitz, in May of that year. Three came back. The nine who had escaped arrest survived until the Liberation. To hold on to this history the village opened, in 2022, a museum of the twentieth century and of the Shoah.