Agosta

At the foot of the hill the village stands on there is a spring which in Roman times was called Augusta, and from it Agosta probably takes its name — because it was Augustus who put his own name on it. The place is cited in the emperor's Res Gestae for the works carried out on the spring in order to draw its waters into the Acqua Marcia, the aqueduct that brought drinking water to Rome, and from those works the spring took its name. In a document of 858 the hill above the spring is called mons Augusta and declared fit for building a castle on: the castle came, and around the castle the village. There is a legend too, which has a princess called Augusta shut up in the tower, and derives the name from her. The abundance of water produced trout ponds and two grain mills, and in 1461 pope Pius II, travelling to visit the monastery of Subiaco, stopped to eat at those very mills: the inhabitants, of their own accord, offered him trout caught on the spot.

Rome came back for the water much later. Between 1922 and 1926 the Acqua Pia Antica Marcia company captured the spring of the Mola to carry its waters to the capital, and it meant to capture the one by the sanctuary of the Madonna del Passo as well: a popular rising prevented that, at least for a while. The village itself had got its first aqueduct only in 1913, and it fed two fountains. Another piece of Agosta had to follow the water: the Arch of the Cardinal was raised in 1503 beside the bridge that then crossed the Aniene, in honour of the cardinal commendatary Giovanni Colonna; a flood carried the bridge away, it was rebuilt some fifty metres off in the seventeen hundreds, and in the end the arch too was moved to keep up with it. On the twenty-sixth of May 1944, in the hamlet of Madonna della Pace, already struck by Allied bombing, the retreating German troops killed fifteen people they had rounded up, in reprisal for the finding of a dead German soldier along the road.