Villa Santa Lucia

The village's old name said only where it stood: Villa di Piedimonte, Villa Pedemontis, that is the settlement at the foot of the mountain. The mountain is Monte Cairo, and the slope is the western one of Montecassino; the first documentary traces are of 1052, when the place is recorded as part of the abbey's territory. Below there are older things: at the place called Santa Scolastica, in 1973, remains of an Iron Age settlement were discovered, confirmed by new finds in 1984, and other material of Roman date has come out in the hamlets of Pittoni and Piumarola. Of the two castles, the one at Piumarola and the one at Sant'Angelo in Fortunula, only ruins remain; the church of the Colloquy of Saint Scholastica, on the other hand, goes back to the sixth century, and in the territory there is also a late nineteenth-century burial ground that everyone calls the Napoleonic cemetery. In the fields they grow the pepper of Pontecorvo, which has obtained the protected designation of origin.

Standing at the foot of Montecassino, however, in 1944 meant standing exactly on the Gustav line. Operation Diadem broke that barrier, and on the twenty-fourth of May the Polish troops came up the valley and entered Villa Santa Lucia: they found it completely destroyed. The source says it in a single line, and there is not much to add: the village that had been fought over no longer existed when it was reached. What can be seen today was rebuilt afterwards, in a territory that in the north rises above eight hundred metres and in the south drops quickly towards the Latin valley.