San Giorgio a Liri

The church of San Giorgio was founded in the first decades of the ninth century and destroyed by the Saracens in 846; rebuilt in the following century, the village grew around it and was later fortified. Throughout the Middle Ages the place remained in the orbit of Montecassino, and the abbey's documents describe a prosperous spot: fertile land, easy to irrigate, and a traffic of goods and people crossing the Liri on the scafa, the local name for ferries pulled along ropes. Just before the middle of the thirteenth century Stefano di San Giorgio was born here, a man of letters and a diplomat, a leading figure of the ars dictandi, active at the English, papal and Angevin courts.

The borders here have moved more than once. At unification the village added the river to its name, to distinguish itself from other places called San Giorgio. In 1927, when the province of Terra di Lavoro was abolished, it was assigned to the new province of Frosinone, and the whole area from Fondi as far as Sora was included in Lazio instead of Campania: the dialect, however, still belongs to the Campanian linguistic family. The church boundary lasted longer than the civil one: until 2014 the parish depended on the territorial abbey of Montecassino, whose jurisdiction was then reduced to the abbey alone, closing a tradition more than a thousand years old. During the war the village stood on the Gustav line and paid for it, between occupation and bombing.