Bellegra

Until 1880 this village was called Civitella. In that year the town council decided to change the name to Bellegra, in the belief that the place stood where an ancient town called Belecre had been — a thesis that one nineteenth-century scholar had put forward and that another judged uncertain and unsupported by any sources, while the documents and Livy's geographical indications pointed instead to a different ancient name, Vitellia. The council chose the weaker hypothesis, and the village has carried it ever since. The name it gave up was itself the product of an accident of writing: the phrase civitas Vitellia was probably written with the first word abbreviated, C. Vitellia, and since old books tended to leave no space between one word and the next it became Civitellia in some manuscript, and then Civitella. A name born of a missing space, abandoned for a name born of a disputed guess.

Civitella appears for the first time in a diploma of the emperor Otto the First, of the eleventh of January 967, which declares it private property and feudal domain: it belonged to the abbatial fief of San Benedetto and Santa Scolastica of Subiaco. Relations with that abbey were stormy. In the second half of the eleventh century the village was governed by a certain Lando, who fell out with the abbot because Civitella had been left out of the distribution of the monastery's goods; the abbot had him seized, and Lando, once free, took his revenge by making a prisoner of the abbot in his turn. He was excommunicated by the Roman council of 1081. Later the lords of Civitella and the people came to an agreement with Subiaco: they were bound to come to the monastery's aid in case of danger, and in exchange the monastery had to defend Civitella — and could not institute proceedings for the illegalities the lords of Civitella had committed or might commit in the future. A treaty that pardoned crimes not yet committed.