Rivodutri

At the springs of Santa Susanna, in 1928, some reclamation works brought to light a Bronze Age settlement: three hundred fragments of pottery — the great storage jars, the pots and the cooking stoves, the cups and the bowls of the table — and, parallel to the river, fossilised tree trunks, that is, what remains of a pile-dwelling village looking onto the water. There were artificial canals too, a sign that people were draining land here three thousand years ago, and traces of burning: the place went up in flames, perhaps at the beginning of the Iron Age. That settlement, left nameless for centuries, has recently been identified with ancient Carsula, city of the Aborigines, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus placed along the via Curia, fourteen kilometres past Rieti.

Then there is the day the village has not forgotten. At dawn on Friday 31 March 1944 a German detachment arrived with two tanks and about a hundred men, convinced that partisans were hiding here. Climbing towards the borgo the soldiers killed an old peasant who had tried to change his road; two cannon shots into via Umberto I broke open a house and killed a woman in her bed; other shots cracked the great bell. Then they gathered all the inhabitants into the parish church and surrounded it with machine guns: there they stayed from seven in the morning until six in the evening, while the houses were searched, emptied and in part burned. Towards four they let the women out with the children; the men were checked one by one and some sixty were loaded onto a lorry. The toll of that day was nine dead and sixty-seven deported to forced labour. Their names are on a plaque in the village.