Rocca di Cave

A hundred million years ago these mountains lay under the sea and were a coral reef: the fossils are still there, and there are marked paths to go and see them. Monte Manno, on which the village stands, was also a volcano until a few million years ago. In 2016 the bones of a sauropod that lived 112 million years ago came to light here, and it was named Tito: the find led scholars to think that in the Cretaceous the Italian peninsula was far larger, large enough to let dinosaurs cross from Africa to Europe. In the fortress there is the geo-palaeontological museum named after Ardito Desio, with a seismic station; on the central tower, an astronomical observatory and a planetarium.

The rock that gives the village its name was built by the Benedictines of Subiaco around 850, to shelter the people from Saracen raids; for a couple of centuries the place was called the Castle of the Three Saints, after the three churches that stood there. Then it belonged, almost always, to the Colonna. On the night of 7 February 1944 the Germans surrounded the village and at dawn brought everyone into the square: the men outside, among the machine guns, the women inside the church. Four German soldiers had been killed, and under the law of war forty people from here were to be shot. Forty had already been picked when one man managed to speak to the general and pointed out the place where it had happened, explaining that a Russian group was up there: the general gave the order to leave the village alone.