Sgurgola

Pope Boniface the eighth ordered the Valencian physician and prophet Arnaldo da Villanova to reside at Sgurgola. He came, and here he wrote one of his most important apocalyptic works, the De mysterio cymbalorum Ecclesiae, in which he drew out the ascetic consequences of the imminent coming of the Antichrist and the end of the world, presented himself as the prophet who rang the bells of evangelical truth, and preached absolute poverty. The village that had to house him stands on the Lepini mountains and looks over the valley of the Sacco, and its name probably comes from a Lombard word meaning a sentinel, precisely because of that position; though another reading connects it, like the name of neighbouring Gorga, with water gushing out, since there are many springs here. Tradition has it that the place was founded by Spartacus, and the source that reports this adds at once that, tradition aside, the village was born of the barbarian invasions, when the people of Anagni and Ferentino came up here for shelter.

Halfway up the mountain to the south, at nearly seven hundred metres, stands the hermitage of San Leonardo, built towards the end of the twelve hundreds by Celestine hermit monks on the remains of an older monastery; inside is the statue of San Leonardo di Noblat, who has been the patron of Sgurgola since the year 1200, and beside it a spring that never dries. Of the little church of San Nicola only the white limestone walls remain, with the springing of a cross vault and a lunette above the door; next to it opens a tunnel out of which, in winter, a stream is born and runs down to the village. In the last war Sgurgola was one of the places where the violence known as the marocchinate took place, committed by colonial troops serving with the French expeditionary corps. And the village keeps a museum of a kind that has few equals: one of Italian brass bands, with their costumes and their instruments.