Strangolagalli

What the name means nobody knows for certain, and the guesses are worth listing. One derives it from a Byzantine Greek word meaning circular, joined to a Lombard term for a palisade: it would then be a settlement fortified in a ring. Another takes it literally: strangolagalli, the cock-strangler, either a nickname of the fourteenth century or older belonging to whoever owned the camp here, or an imperative — strangle the cocks! — as in the name of a hamlet of Castel di Sasso, in the province of Caserta. A scholar of the seventeenth century preferred to see in it the villa of a Roman patrician called Astragalus Gallus. The comune, when it was granted arms in 1999, chose the literal reading, with a variation: on a silver field a fox rears up and seizes a cock with both its forepaws.

For about seven kilometres the territory lies on the southern Via Francigena, on the stage that runs from Veroli to Ceprano; the pilgrims follow the sign of the fish, and the whole road, from Rome to the Apulian ports from which people once embarked for the Holy Land, is some eight hundred kilometres divided into thirty stages. At point one hundred and thirteen of that road a keeper of a pilgrim hostel had a mural painted by an Italian-Hungarian artist, Ágnes Preszler — the first in Italy on the subject of this walk — showing sacred places and people dear to the man who commissioned it; and between 2014 and 2016 eight life-size iron figures were cut with a plasma torch and set along the route. It is an open-air museum, free, made for those passing through. The village also had a church of San Rocco, which the Germans destroyed as they retreated from the Cassino front: it was rebuilt in 2024.