San Vittore del Lazio

The town sits perched on a hill looking over the valley where the Liri flows into the Gari, and its territory is the wedge of Lazio driven in between Campania and Molise: it is one of the five comuni of Lazio that border more than one region other than their own. It was born in the ninth century around a church built by the Benedictines of Montecassino, who governed these lands, and the oldest mention of the castle, of 1057, records it as part of the Terra di San Benedetto. That bond lasted far longer than one would expect: until 2014 the comune belonged not to a diocese but to the territorial abbey of Montecassino, and only then passed to the diocese of Sora-Cassino-Aquino-Pontecorvo. Much higher up, on the western slope of Monte Sammucro, some kilometre and a half of megalithic walls run on, probably Samnite, which are identified with those of Aquilonia.

The castle, in the fifteenth century, belonged to the Mancini of Venafro; when they died out it passed with the palace and the lands to the Mancini of Naples, marquesses of Fusignano, who however never lived there, preferring to stay at Castel Baronia in the Principato Ultra. One had to wait for the nineteenth century before one of them set foot in it as master of the house: count Antonio Mancini, first lieutenant of the royal gendarmerie of the army of the Two Sicilies, inherited all the family's goods in the Terra di Lavoro and was the first to make his home in the ancestral castle. For the inhabitants, though, the monument that counts is the church of San Nicola, which keeps fourteenth-century painting cycles with the works of mercy and the martyrdom of Saint Margaret of Antioch; Santa Maria della Rosa, instead, follows a very ancient arrangement, with the bell tower planted in the middle of the façade. On the coat of arms there is a saint on horseback, with halo, wings and armour, facing a lion with his lance. For centuries people lived here on clay, cast bronze and wood.