Paper mills have marked Sora's identity from the start, because the Liri and the Fibreno, the two rivers that embrace the town, gave it for centuries the power to make paper before gas turbines arrived; the town's very name, linguists say, may come from an Indo-European root meaning rock and water, referring to Monte San Casto and the Liri together. It was a Volscian town before Rome conquered it between 326 and 312 BC, at the battle of Lautulae, and in 303 sent four thousand colonists to found a colony there. On Monte San Casto polygonal walls from that Volscian era still stand, and higher up a castle of which mostly ruins remain today: they were piled up like that after the Neapolitan revolution of 1799.
Sora was a county and then, from 1443, a duchy; in 1796 the king of Naples abolished it, personally repaying the duke Boncompagni who owned it. The Marsica earthquake of 1915 razed much of the town that stood along the banks of the Liri, and the reconstruction of the nineteen-twenties and thirties gave it an orderly grid layout, a design that the postwar building boom would soon overwhelm, sacrificing farmland and pasture for new outlying districts. The paper mills have stayed, amid periodic controversy over pollution settled with new filters; and every sixteenth of August, for the feast of Saint Roch, thousands of the faithful still carry the saint's statue with his dog through the streets on their shoulders.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 27 May
Sora celebrates Saint Restituta on 27 May, in the church dedicated to her; the town, an important industrial and commercial centre, hosts the Sora Fair every year, drawing thousands of visitors.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
