Cisterna di Latina

On the Appia, here, stood Tres Tabernae: the three taverns of the name are still on the town's arms. The place appears in the Acts of the Apostles, because when Saint Paul was taken to Rome a prisoner, the Christians of the capital came out along the Appia to meet him and found him exactly at Tres Tabernae. It became a bishopric, and a cathedral dedicated to Paul was built there, of which nothing survives; and here, in the fourth century, a Roman emperor was murdered, Flavius Severus. Then the marsh spread, the Appia was diverted, the Saracens finished the job in 868, and the survivors moved north, to where the road crossed a ditch: that village first appears around the year one thousand as Terra di Cisterna.

The name comes from a cistern that tradition attributes to Nero, built to bring water to his villa at Antium — in the Middle Ages the town was called Cisterna Neronis; but Antonio Pennacchi, in «Una nuvola rossa», argues that the cistern belonged to an imperial plan to drain the marshes. In 1159 a newly elected pope, Alexander III, fled here and then to Ninfa, hunted by Frederick Barbarossa's soldiers: at Ninfa he was crowned, and the emperor in revenge levelled both places. Ninfa never rose again, and that is why it is the garden it is today: the Caetani, princes of Cisterna from the sixteenth century, made it an Eden of roses and streams among the ruins, open only on counted days. The other memory is hard: in nineteen forty-four, after the Anzio landing, general Darby's Rangers were cut to pieces at Isolabella and few came back. In 1982 Cisterna twinned with Fort Smith, Arkansas, the town where Darby was born.