Canterano stands on the Ruffi mountains, above the upper Aniene valley, and on its coat of arms — recognised in 1941 — it carries something you would not expect up here: a ship under full sail. It is meant to recall the village's remotest origins and, by one attractive theory, would be the vessel that brought the Pelasgians to Italy, the people to whom some scholars attribute the polygonal walls still to be seen near the cemetery. Part of those walls was pulled down in 1880 to make way for the road that skirts them.
After the Pelasgians came the Aequi, who lived between the Fucino and the upper Aniene valley and whom Silius Italicus described as a people of herding, farming and hunting, always under arms even while working their fields. The Romans defeated them but did not destroy them, and Livy relates that dozens of their strongholds were burnt. From the remotest past there remain the bronze axes found in a natural cache at La Sportelletta and two Neolithic axes, now kept in two Roman museums. Above the village open the caves of the Bucia Cucera, deep and very old, where the people of Canterano took shelter during the bombing of the last war.
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📅 Every year, on 15 January
On 15 January Canterano celebrates its patrons Saint Maurus the Abbot and Our Lady of the Angels, to whom the town's sanctuary is dedicated.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Canterano, but an easy day trip away.
