Vallerotonda

Every kind of line has passed over Vallerotonda, and none of them was asked for. This corner of the Apennines belonged to the Terra di Lavoro, that is to the South, and only in the nineteen twenties, when the provinces were redrawn, did it end up in Lazio. Twenty years later a far harder line ran across it: the Gustav Line, the fortified belt that cut the peninsula in two, crossed the territory of the comune — the Germans to the north, the Allies to the south, and the front in the middle of people's own fields. The third line, the one that runs through souls, moved recently too: until 2014 the parishes depended not on a bishop but on the territorial abbey of Montecassino, and only since then have they belonged to the diocese of Sora-Cassino-Aquino-Pontecorvo.

The rest is a mountain village inside the national park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, with the Mainarde range on the border with Molise, the pinewood of Valle dell'Inferno and two lakes: Cardito and the artificial Selva, which it shares with San Biagio Saracinisco. In dialect it is called Vardónna. It lives on oil — the comune belongs to the national association of the Cities of Oil — on sheep, since the territory falls within the zone of Picinisco pecorino, and on wood: the traditional craft is the making of country chairs. After all those lines drawn across it by others, the coat of arms granted in 1991 puts one single thing on a silver field: a heart aflame in red.