Sant'Elia Fiumerapido

Sant'Elia Fiumerapido has 6,227 inhabitants on the left bank of the river Rapido, at the foot of the mountains that close the Cassino valley. The town is a monastic foundation: abbot Mansone of Montecassino set it up in 995, on a hillock, and it took its name from a little church dedicated to the prophet Elijah that stood further down, near the river. That church had already been laid waste, together with the village around it, in the Saracen raids of 866; today what remains there is the upper part of a Roman bridge, which everyone still calls Sant'Elia Vecchio.

For nearly five centuries paper was made here. The mill is documented from 1516, when master papermakers came from the Marche to set it up; then the town produced papermakers of its own, a second mill was opened, and the works went on running until the nineteen-sixties. The date nobody forgets, however, is 8 December 1943: an Allied air raid destroyed ninety-one per cent of the built-up area.