San Giovanni Incarico

The village was born of a destruction: when Fabrateria Nova was destroyed by the Lombards, its people took refuge on the slopes of the hill that still dominates the town, then called Colle San Maurizio. On its top stood a small church dedicated to Saint Maurice, later abandoned and closed. Then came the Saracen raids of the eleventh century, and a lookout was set on that summit to warn the people in time; and it was then that a statue of the Madonna was placed in the old church, called the Madonna della Guardia — of the Watch — because she was to keep the guard herself. Today she is co-patron of the town with Saint John the Baptist, who stands in the arms with his lamb.

San Giovanni Incarico separated from Pontecorvo in 1053. From the sixteenth century it belonged to the Farnese and in the eighteenth to the Medici-Farnese states; until unification it lay in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in the Terra di Lavoro, and two things still say so: the fountain in the main square, put up by Ferdinand the Fourth of Bourbon and carrying his inscription, and, on the boundary with Falvaterra, the stones that marked the frontier between the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples. The Liri used to run right through the village; in the middle of the nineteen-forties a dam was built for a hydroelectric plant, and the river became the lake of San Giovanni Incarico, which now lies inside a nature reserve together with the ruins of Fregellae and Fabrateria Nova.