Sant'Apollinare

The name is medieval: the Benedictine monks of Montecassino built here a cella dedicated to Apollinaris, the martyr bishop of Ravenna, and the village grew out of their settlement. It stands on a small knoll in the lower Liri valley, a short way from the right bank of the river. At the edge of its territory, at a place called Giunture — the joinings — the Liri meets the Gari, and from that point on the river is called the Garigliano and serves as the border between Lazio and Campania. The village's own administrative history follows the same line: it belonged to the Terra di San Benedetto, then, from the Norman conquest, to the Terra di Lavoro — the kingdom of Sicily, then of Naples, then of the Two Sicilies — and after unification it found itself in Campania. It passed to Lazio only in 1927, when the province of Frosinone was created.

The old parish church stood inside the walls of the castrum and is recorded in 1514 under the title of Santa Maria degli Angeli. It was almost square, four arches carried on a single massive central column, eight altars, a boarded roof except over the high altar, which was vaulted. In the seventeen hundreds it was turned into three naves; in the forties of that century the new bell tower was built; and in 1750 it was consecrated by the bishop of Aquino and Pontecorvo, who on that occasion gave the village the body of a boy martyr taken from the catacombs of San Callisto. The war destroyed it: the village lay on the Gustav line, the fortified line that cut Italy in two and was broken through in May 1944. The church was rebuilt to a new design, and in the rebuilding the entrance and the apse changed places: the building was turned through half a circle. Out in the fields there is a well bearing the date 1634, and in 1994 a Roman burial ground was found.