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The Story of the Mountain
Founded in the early eighth century as a northward outpost of the Duchy of
Benevento, the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno became an important religious, cultural, economic and political center whose strategic positioning was well understood by Charlemagne, who projected it onto a scenario of European importance.
Destroyed by the Saracens in 881, it fully recovered its strategic position at
the end of the tenth century, giving rise to the repopulation of the area through the castellation of most of the current municipalities of the upper Volturno Valley, thus taking the territory away from the forests to return and/or initiate it to villages, cultivated fields, livestock farming, in other words, to human consensus. The monks re-conducted men, women, entire households and brought them to live in the castra, the encampments that would later become the villages perched on the hills and from which would spread across the territory masserie and a multiplicity of artifacts (haystacks, entirely made of plant materials, pagliare, partly made of wood partly made of dry stone masonry, rural buildings entirely made of stone) used for the shelter of animals, agricultural tools and the people themselves while working in the fields.
Land of farmers and shepherds, then, that of San Vincenzo in which they developed and handed down traditions and craft knowledge still present, surviving the world that had expressed them and able to still speak to our time, to be useful to us and to excite us:
- the bagpipe, heritage of the area but particularly rooted in Scapoli where
craft workshops for its construction, an international music festival,
museum institutes and a documentation center keep alive the community's link with its past and attract thousands of visitors to the area from all parts
of Italy and even abroad in search of authenticity and roots;
- the Deer of Castelnuovo al Volturno, a zoomorphic mask that at every carnival reproposes the eternal struggle between good and evil, the conflict between wild nature and the world of humans, also attracting, with its magical pantomime, a crowd of spectators/tourists to the small town clinging to the mountain of San Michele;
- the agri-food products and typical local gastronomy that are the result of knowledge and offer flavors that speak of lifestyles, production and processing techniques transmitted from one generation to the next and that for some time now have begun to be valued as excellences and quality brands of the territory; starting with the raviolo scapolese that used to be eaten in the family on the fat days of carnival and that today is celebrated and made available to the many visitors in a festival (the raviolata) established by the Circolo della Zampogna in 1991 and organized every year on the last Sunday of carnival.
That of the Abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno was not, however, only a land of shepherds and peasants; history, the one with a capital “S”, has imprinted its marks there several times, both positively and negatively.
Indeed, on these mountains was consumed a part of the economic and social malaise that exploded in the South of Italy, with dramatic implications, as part of the process of unification of the country and that goes by the name of Brigantaggio. On the Mainarde the phenomenon centered particularly on the figure of the brigand Centrillo, alias Domenico Coia born in Castelnuovo al Volturno in 1828, also known as the Masaniello of the Mainarde. At the head of a large band of more than 150 men he operated mainly in the area using as his base, according to current vernacular, precisely one of the existing rural buildings in the Monte Marrone area. After participating in the battle of Gaeta in support of Bourbon King Francis II, distinguishing himself by skill and courage, he was arrested in Rome by the French and tried in Cassino, where
he was acquitted on October 20, 1865, along with other men in his band.
Battle of Monte Marrone
The Battle of Monte Marrone on March 31, 1944 saw the Italian Liberation Corps, commanded by General Umberto Utili, in combat near Cassino. In the episode, Italian units supported by Moroccan units operating nearby tried to force the Germans to abandon Monte Marrone and Monte Mare, two heights of the small Mainarde mountain range, between Lazio and Molise.
The Battle
The battle was a stage of the Italian war of liberation[1].
The attack on the peak, 1805 m above sea level, was launched in the middle of the night on March 31 by the Italian Alpine troops of the Piedmont battalion who occupied it with a surprise attack[2]. Elements of the 3rd Bersaglieri Regiment were deployed with the Italian Liberation Corps (C.I.L.), specifically the XXIX and XXXIII battalions and the first motorcycle company of the C.I.L. who on that occasion earned a Silver Medal for Military Valor awarded to the Goito Battalion; furthermore, the Alpine Battalion "Piemonte" and the paratroopers of the Paratrooper Division "Nembo" were involved in the battle; the Alpine troops reached the objective while the paratroopers failed to dislodge the German units from the summit. On April 2, the Germans made an exploratory attack that stopped 800 meters from the Italian lines, and the next day at 5:30 they began a strong attack, repelled by Italian fire and by the minefields placed to protect their lines; a new attack was attempted on April 10 with three battalions of Gebirgsjaeger (the German Alpine units), one of which managed to penetrate the Italian lines, giving rise to a series of hand-to-hand combat in the trenches and threatening to dislodge the Italians from the summit, but a new company of Alpine reinforcements averted the danger; artillery fire prevented the influx of German reinforcements and the Italians were able to reconquer the positions that had fallen into enemy hands.
The Consequences
The conquest of the peak allowed the Italians to advance along the Monte Marrone, Monte Mare, Venafrana plain, Picinisco direction, a town that was reached on April 28.
The Legends of the Mountain
Coming Soon...