Spigno Saturnia

The name comes from two thorny plants that grew over this territory, the hawthorn and the blackthorn, and from what the people did with the second: they wove its thorns into their fences to make them harder to cross. From the ninth to the eleventh century the place was called Spinium, or Casalis Spini; in the twelfth it was Castrum Spinei; by the seventeenth it had become Spigno. Then, on the sixteenth of February 1862, just after unification, the comune added a second word: Saturnia, the ancient poetic name of Italy, tied to the god Saturn. A village that was named after its own hedges took, in the year the new state was settling its map, a name that stood for the whole country. Until the sixth century the settlement stood elsewhere, at a place called Santo Stefano, where the ancient Auruncan city of Ausona may have been; the castle one sees today was built by the Normans at the end of the eleventh century.

In 1438 Alfonso of Aragon, mindful of the promises he had made during the siege of Gaeta, gave the government of Spigno to Onorato Caetani, whom the people fondly called the little king: he issued privileges and provisions in favour of his subjects, gathered in a kind of statute, the oldest of which there is any notice here, guaranteeing the observance of the old customs, establishing what was owed to the treasury, granting fiscal relief, restoring the boundaries and setting out how the fief was to be administered. When feudalism was abolished in 1806, the Universitas became a Comune and the old judges gave way to a mayor and his councillors; and yet, the source notes, for many decades nothing substantial changed in the social life of the village: illiteracy and privilege remained, and the rights proclaimed by the French revolution stayed out of reach. In 1911 the people rose against the local ruling class. During the war Spigno was almost entirely destroyed in the fighting along the Gustav Line, between the autumn of 1943 and the spring of 1944; and afterwards it was decided to build a new village, Spigno Nuovo, in the plain below the old one.