Cori

Cori is the ancient Cora, and it stands on the last spur of the Lepini mountains, in a commanding position above the Pontine plain: on clear days the eye reaches the sea, the promontory of Circeo and the Ponza islands. The legends give it divine founders — the Trojan Dardanus, a king of Alba Longa, Aeneas — and then a rebuilder, Coras, a veteran of the Trojan war, who is said to have given it his own name; the name, however, may simply come from the archaic Latin corax, the crow, as a totem animal. Cora was among the oldest cities of the Prisci Latini and struck its own coin, the corano; in 642 before Christ, when Tullus Hostilius demanded the submission of the Latin cities, the Latin League answered with war, and it was a man of Cora, Publicio Anco, who led it. As an allied city of Rome it kept a wide autonomy, wide enough to use the initials SPQC, and Virgil names it in the Aeneid.

In 1312 the first pacts were agreed between the city of Rome and the community of Cori, which from then on was a fief of the Roman senate: Cori gave Rome a statue of Minerva of the first century before Christ, which today stands in Piazza del Campidoglio, and Rome gave back its protection and the colours yellow and red. Before that the town had known a long decline: a Saracen raid in 832, the sack by Frederick Barbarossa's troops in 1167, the grant to Pietro degli Annibaldi decided by Innocent the Third in 1211 and the return to the Church in 1234, when Gregory the Ninth declared it an inalienable castellany. Papal rule did not stop the commune from growing: the first town statute is from the middle of the thirteenth century, the old public palace still serves as the town hall, and as a free comune Cori was militarily allied to Velletri from at least 1207. From those centuries comes the shape of the old town, divided between Cori Monte and Cori Valle: narrow lanes, squares, churches, porticoes. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a Jewish community lived in both halves, and disappeared with the papal bull of 1593. The temple of Hercules, of the early first century before Christ, is a national monument; the church of Santa Oliva was built between 1467 and 1485 over a Roman temple of Janus, and keeps in its apse a fresco of Pinturicchio's school and, beside it, a cloister of 1480.