Cittareale

In the Falacrina valley, where Cittareale stands today, there was the vicus Phalacrinae: here, in the year 9 after Christ, Titus Flavius Vespasian was born, emperor and father of two more emperors, Titus and Domitian. The family villa has been found in the San Lorenzo district by the excavations that the British School at Rome and the University of Perugia have been running since 2005, and the finds are in the town museum, opened in 2009 for the two thousandth anniversary of Vespasian's birth.

On the birth of the village the sources disagree: for the older historiography it was founded by Manfred in 1261 on the ruins of a settlement destroyed by the Saracens, and Charles I of Anjou gave it the name Cittareale; for the recent one it was born in 1329 by the will of Robert of Anjou, who granted advantages and immunities so that it should be a free town at the gates of the Kingdom. Either way it is a border village: the fortress one sees is the one the Aragonese rebuilt in 1479, and Cittareale remained Abruzzese, in the district of L'Aquila, for more than six hundred years, until 1927, when it passed to the province of Rieti and to Lazio.