Borgorose

In the Salto valley on the border with Abruzzo, the town has been called Borgorose only since 1960: before that it was Borgocollefegato, and the name was replaced with one thought more euphonious. Its province is recent too: for more than six hundred years, from 1233 to Italian unification, the territory belonged to the Giustizierato of Abruzzo and to the province of Abruzzo Ulteriore II, in the district of Cittaducale, and it stayed with L'Aquila until 1927, when the creation of the province of Rieti moved it into Lazio. In dialect it is still Ju Bùrgu.

Two ancient towns lie underneath. In the hamlet of Sant'Anatolia stood Thora, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus remembers for an oracle of Mars whose answers were given by a sacred woodpecker; at Corvaro a fortified oppidum with polygonal walls has been identified with Lista, mother city of the Aborigines, taken by surprise in a night raid by Sabines who came from Amiternum. Many churches still rest on those walls: San Mauro in Fano keeps in its name the fanum, the temple that came before it.