Lenola

The name is a plant: in the Middle Ages the fortified place was called Inola, Inula, Enula, after the elecampane, and that herb has been the village's emblem from time out of mind. Lenola stands at the western edge of its province, and until a few years ago, at kilometre thirty-six of the road to Frosinone, one could still see the stone marking the border between the Papal State and the Kingdom of Naples: Lenola was its last outpost. Vittorio Emanuele III said that the view from here was the finest in Italy, and from the seventeenth century the bishops of Fondi came up to spend the summer, for the cool dry air.

The first record of the castrum Inule is from 1072, when the duke of Fondi gave it to the abbey of Montecassino; in 1299 it passed with the whole county of Fondi to the Caetani. On the night between the eighth and the ninth of August 1534 the Ottoman admiral Khayr al-Din, known as Barbarossa, attacked Fondi to carry off countess Giulia Gonzaga, who was warned in time and escaped: some historians believe she took refuge here at Lenola. The sanctuary of the Madonna del Colle was founded by Gabriele Mattei, who called himself Fra Deogratias, and its first years were told in ottava rima by a local surgeon and poet, Curzio Mattei, who had witnessed them. From Lenola came also Gerardo Fasolo, who at eighteen enlisted in the Cacciatori delle Alpi and at Magenta, in 1859, saved the life of king Vittorio Emanuele II.