While researching this book, one name appeared repeatedly: Michele Santulli, an art historian and researcher from Atina who has spent much of his life studying the history, art and people of Ciociaria. Behind his work lies a persistent conviction that this region — and the contribution made by people who came from it — has never received the recognition it deserves.

 

His books are not generally available through regular bookshops or the usual online booksellers, and they are published only in Italian. That is unfortunate for an international audience: decades of research have brought together an extraordinary cast of people whose influence reached far beyond the region, many now largely absent from wider memory.

 

This chapter owes a particular debt to that work. With Michele's permission, I have made my own selection from his research, sometimes following a name or story further when curiosity led elsewhere. This is not an attempt to reproduce his work, but to open a window onto a part of Ciociaria's story I might otherwise never have found.

There are far too many names to explore properly here. Some deserve more time because the story behind them is too good to pass over; others may be little more than a lead. Travelling through Southern Lazio, many reappear on street signs, monuments and plaques marking the houses where they were born.

 

It helps to know who they were.

 

And there is no shortage of material.

 

Santulli begins with two names that require little introduction: Cicero and Juvenal. Cicero was born at Arpinum, today’s Arpino, in 106 BC; Juvenal came from Aquinum, modern Aquino, probably almost two centuries later. Both belonged to the wider Roman world, of course, long before anyone spoke of Ciociaria.

 

From Arpinum, Cicero rose to the centre of Roman political and intellectual life, becoming one of antiquity's great orators and leaving writings that influenced European thought for centuries. Juvenal went to Rome and chronicled the crowded, chaotic capital with biting wit; his provincial origins may have sharpened the outsider's eye with which he observed Roman society and its pretensions.

 

But their birthplaces are still there, and that changes the way one looks at them.

 

Arpino in particular has a habit of producing names out of proportion to its size. A generation before Cicero it had given Rome Gaius Marius, the soldier and statesman who rose from outside the traditional aristocratic elite to dominate the late Republic. A celebrated general, he was elected consul an extraordinary seven times and helped shape the military and political struggles of the decades before Cicero.

 

Walk through the town today and these are no longer abstract names from Roman history. Cicero’s family estate is traditionally associated with the countryside below the town, while the ancient acropolis of Civitavecchia still rises above it with its great polygonal walls and pointed arch. Arpino is worth visiting without knowing any of this. Knowing it makes the place rather harder to forget.

 

Santulli's list then begins to spread. Ferentino gave Rome Aulus Hirtius, consul, soldier and associate of Julius Caesar; Sezze produced the epic poet Gaius Valerius Flaccus. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, whose name still dominates the façade of the Pantheon, also enters Santulli's wider map of connections with the territory. The point is less the individual claims than the density of connections: these towns were never as detached from the Roman world as their present scale might suggest.

 

Cassino brings us to a woman who deserves a little more time. Ummidia Quadratilla was one of the wealthiest women of Roman Casinum, living into her late seventies and using part of her fortune on a distinctly public scale. Inscriptions credit her with paying for an amphitheatre and a temple for the citizens of the town; the amphitheatre still survives.

 

Our liveliest glimpse of Ummidia comes from Pliny the Younger, who seems to have regarded one of her enthusiasms with some suspicion. She maintained her own troupe of pantomime performers and enjoyed watching them. Pliny disapproved, although the evidence suggests that her interest in theatre went well beyond private amusement: her performers appeared at public games, and she was also a patron of theatrical buildings. One modern scholar has described the result, not entirely fancifully, as a small 'theatrical empire'.

 

Her probable mausoleum survives too, unusually situated within the ancient city walls. Almost two thousand years later, the wealthy Roman woman, her actors and the buildings she paid for have left more of a mark on Cassino than Pliny's disapproval ever managed.

 

Not every name needs a biography. The cumulative effect is perhaps more interesting: towns that today seem peripheral were anything but isolated from the political and cultural world around them.

 

Several centuries later, that relationship with the wider world becomes even more striking.

At Roccasecca, a castle overlooking the Liri Valley is traditionally identified as the birthplace of Thomas Aquinas. Born around 1225 into a noble family, Thomas left the world for which he had been intended and entered the Dominican order. His family was sufficiently appalled by the decision to have him detained for a time, but it did little good. He went on to study and teach in some of the great intellectual centres of medieval Europe and became one of Christianity's most influential thinkers.

 

His Summa Theologiae is hardly holiday reading, but its influence reaches far beyond theology. Thomas sought to reconcile Christian thought with the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle, helping shape the intellectual world of medieval Europe.

 

There was also a gentler side to the formidable theologian. Thomas was a poet, and for the feast of Corpus Christi he composed a series of hymns that remain part of Catholic liturgical tradition. One of them, Sacris solemniis, contains the stanza beginning Panis angelicus — “Bread of Angels”.

 

Six centuries later, the Belgian-born composer César Franck set those words to music. His Panis Angelicus became far better known than the medieval hymn from which they came and has since been performed by generations of great singers. To hear how far a few lines by a thirteenth-century theologian from Roccasecca travelled, the interpretations by Andrea Bocelli, Renée Fleming or Luciano Pavarotti and Sting are worth finding.

 

It is a beautiful connection across the centuries: words written by Thomas Aquinas in medieval Italy, transformed into music by Franck in nineteenth-century France, and still being sung around the world today.

 

And Thomas's story travelled widely even during his own lifetime. From the castle above Roccasecca it leads to Naples, Paris and the great universities and intellectual debates of medieval Europe. It is difficult to look at those ruins in quite the same way once you know where the story went.

 

Not far away, another figure from this landscape would exercise influence of a very different kind.

 

Lotario dei Conti di Segni, better known as Pope Innocent III, was born in the twelfth century into the powerful Conti family associated with Segni and the area around Anagni. Elected pope in 1198 while still a relatively young man, he would become one of the most powerful pontiffs of the Middle Ages.

 

His world was one in which the papacy claimed authority far beyond religion. Innocent intervened in disputes between kings, became deeply involved in imperial politics, called the Fourth Crusade and presided over the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Decisions made by a man whose family belonged to this landscape reached courts and kingdoms across Europe.

 

There is another, quieter reason to remember him. Before becoming pope, Lotario wrote De miseria humanae conditionis — On the Misery of the Human Condition — a sombre meditation on human existence that became enormously influential. Centuries later, Renaissance humanists would celebrate the dignity and excellence of mankind partly in reaction to the pessimistic medieval tradition his text had come to represent.

 

The contrast is striking. Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile faith and reason; Innocent III contemplated the misery of the human condition while exercising power at the highest level of medieval Europe. From neighbouring parts of Southern Lazio, both entered arguments that travelled far beyond them.

 

And they were far from the end of the story.

 

The Renaissance brings another cluster of names. Aonio Paleario of Veroli became entangled in the religious conflicts of the Reformation and paid for his convictions with his life. From Bassiano came Aldus Manutius, better known as Aldo Manuzio, whose Venetian printing house transformed the circulation of classical literature. His small portable editions have been called distant ancestors of the modern paperback; he also helped establish italic type — although anyone who has cursed italics in a badly designed restaurant menu should probably not hold that against him.

 

From Sora came Cesare Baronio, born in 1538, who became a cardinal and one of the great historians of the Catholic Church. His Annales Ecclesiastici eventually ran to twelve volumes, taking Church history from its beginnings to 1198. Originally intending to become a lawyer, Baronio fell under the influence of Filippo Neri in Rome, eventually succeeding him as head of the Oratorians and becoming confessor to Pope Clement VIII.

 

Twelve volumes of ecclesiastical history may not immediately quicken the pulse of the modern traveller. Baronio, however, was writing in a Europe divided by the Protestant Reformation, when the Catholic Church was reforming its own institutions while defending its teachings, authority and interpretation of the past — the broad response we know as the Counter-Reformation.

 

Baronio belonged to its intellectual front line. His Annales answered Protestant interpretations of Church history with historical scholarship intended to demonstrate the continuity and legitimacy of the Catholic Church. A man from Sora had entered one of the great arguments of his age.

 

But among the artists Santulli brings together, one name deserves a longer stop.

 

Giuseppe Cesari was born in Arpino in 1568. History remembers him as the Cavalier d'Arpino, and for a period around the turn of the seventeenth century he was one of the most successful painters in Rome. Popes commissioned him. His patrons included the emperor Rudolf II and the kings of France and Spain. He worked in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill and in St Peter's, while his enormous Ascension in San Giovanni in Laterano, commissioned by Pope Clement VIII, helped earn him the knighthood from which the name Cavalier d'Arpino derives.

 

Cesari belonged to the late Mannerist world that Caravaggio would soon help overturn. His paintings favoured elegance, elaborate compositions and idealised figures, qualities that had dominated Roman art but were beginning to fall out of favour. The change was not merely artistic. In the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church increasingly wanted religious painting to be clear, persuasive and decorous: sacred images should instruct the faithful rather than distract them with excessive sensuality or display.

 

Cesari therefore occupied an intriguing moment in the history of painting: enormously successful, working for popes and princes, but representing a tradition whose dominance was beginning to weaken.

 

His fame today, however, suffers from a rather unfortunate problem.

 

One of the young men who worked in his studio was called Michelangelo Merisi.

 

We know him as Caravaggio.

 

The young Caravaggio arrived in Rome poor, ambitious and not yet Caravaggio in the sense that we understand the name today. In Cesari's busy workshop he was employed principally on flowers and fruit. Two paintings from this early period, Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the extraordinary Sick Bacchus, later belonged to Cesari himself.

 

How they eventually reached the Galleria Borghese is a story worthy of seventeenth-century Rome.

 

By 1607 Cesari was wealthy, successful and the owner of an important collection of paintings. He also collected firearms. Pope Paul V's authorities accused him of possessing weapons without the necessary permit, imprisoned him and confiscated his collection. More than a hundred paintings were seized and handed to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an enthusiastic collector who thereby acquired, among other things, Cesari's early Caravaggios. The Galleria Borghese records that 104 other works were confiscated alongside Cesari's Taking of Christ.

 

One suspects that owning a particularly fine collection of paintings in papal Rome could occasionally be more dangerous than owning the guns.

 

Cesari recovered from the episode and continued working for decades. When he died in Rome in 1640, he was still a figure of considerable standing. He had been elected principe of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca three times, and three years after his death his remains were transferred to San Giovanni in Laterano, where his family erected an imposing marble monument to him. The painter who is now so often introduced through Caravaggio had, in his own lifetime, been one of the great names of the Roman art world.

 

His reputation was eventually eclipsed by the younger artist who had once painted fruit in his workshop, but his career offers a useful warning against looking backwards through art history. Caravaggio was not always the famous one.

 

And Cesari was certainly not an isolated case.

 

The following centuries produced painters such as Andrea Cavallucci of Sermoneta, Teodoro Mancini of Atina, and Vincenzo Petrocelli of Cervaro. Filippo Balbi, although born in Naples, spent a substantial part of his life at the Certosa di Trisulti, filling the monastery with paintings and frescoes. Santulli also draws attention to Alfonso Simonetti, another Neapolitan by birth who made Castrocielo his home.

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Then there is Carolina Carlesimo.

 

Born in 1867 to a mother from Gallinaro and a father from Casalvieri, Carolina Carlesimo eventually reached Paris and began working as an artists' model, posing for painters including Jean-Jacques Henner and Ferdinand Roybet. Then something unusual happened: the woman being painted decided she wanted to be on the other side of the easel.

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Under the name Juana Romani she built a serious career of her own, exhibiting repeatedly at the Paris Salon and becoming known for portraits and strongly characterised female figures. In a city full of young women who appeared in paintings and remarkably short of women allowed to paint them professionally, the model had become the painter.

 

Her story also introduces something that becomes increasingly noticeable as Santulli's list moves into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The names begin to travel — to Paris, London, South America and the artistic centres of northern Europe. Sometimes opportunity drew them abroad; sometimes they formed part of the much larger movement of Italians leaving the country. Either way, the cultural history of these towns was becoming increasingly international.

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One sculptor, however, hardly needed to travel at all to create an extraordinary body of work.

 

Domenico Mastroianni, born in Arpino in 1876, developed an unusual speciality. He modelled elaborate scenes in clay — biblical episodes, historical events, scenes from novels, soldiers, lovers, saints and moments of everyday life — some astonishingly complex.

 

Then he photographed them.

 

The photographs were reproduced as postcards, a new mass medium spreading rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hundreds of different Mastroianni images survive.

 

And the original sculptures?

 

He destroyed them.

 

Once a composition had been photographed, the clay could be used again. Mastroianni flattened the work and began another. Santulli estimates that some six hundred or more postcard images can still be encountered, each preserving a sculpture that in most cases disappeared almost as soon as the camera shutter closed.

 

There is something wonderfully modern about it: elaborate works of art created to become reproducible images, circulated widely and then sacrificed to make the next one.

 

The surname, incidentally, is familiar for another reason. Domenico was the uncle of Umberto Mastroianni, one of Italy's important twentieth-century sculptors, and of Marcello Mastroianni, whose face would eventually travel considerably further than any postcard.

 

But before cinema enters the story, there are several more people Santulli refuses to let us forget.

 

One is Tommaso Landolfi, born in Pico in 1908, novelist, translator and one of the more unusual voices of twentieth-century Italian literature. Landolfi translated Russian writers and developed a literary language so distinctive that his work can be difficult even for Italians.

 

He also provides a useful complication to this entire chapter.

 

According to Santulli, one of the greatest insults that could be directed at Landolfi was to call him a Ciociaro.

 

The matter apparently became serious enough to produce a spirited exchange in the Gazzetta Ciociara between Landolfi and Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Born in Frosinone in 1890, Bragaglia was a pioneering Futurist photographer, filmmaker, theatre director and writer—and a formidable personality in his own right.

He was also a passionate advocate of ciociarità: the idea of a distinct Ciociarian identity, shaped by the region’s culture, character and shared inheritance. Santulli describes their exchange as a literary battle in which neither side emerged victorious.

It is a delightful disagreement to find in a chapter inspired by a man who has spent much of his life persuading the world that these people were Ciociari — and a reminder that identity is rarely as tidy as a map.

 

If Landolfi was reluctant to be claimed by Ciociaria, Anton Giulio Bragaglia had no such hesitation. Born in Frosinone in 1890, he was one of those people for whom a single profession seems insufficient. Photographer, writer, theatre director, critic, filmmaker and impresario, he threw himself into the artistic experimentation of the early twentieth century and became closely associated with Italian Futurism.

 

Photography was among his earliest experiments. Together with his brother Arturo, Bragaglia tried to capture movement itself, producing sequences in which a gesture appears to travel through the photograph rather than being frozen at a single instant. He called the technique fotodinamismo — photodynamism — and published his ideas in 1911, when photography was still struggling to be taken seriously as an artistic medium.

 

The Futurists themselves were not always impressed, and Bragaglia's ideas about photography eventually brought him into conflict with some of the movement's leading figures. It does not seem to have discouraged him very much.

 

He turned increasingly towards theatre and in Rome created the Teatro degli Indipendenti in a converted underground space in Via degli Avignonesi. Italian audiences encountered Chekhov, Strindberg, Jarry, O'Neill and Brecht there alongside Italian experimental theatre, while his Casa d'Arte Bragaglia became a meeting place for artists and writers.

 

Anton Giulio was not the only Bragaglia. His brothers Arturo, Carlo Ludovico and Alberto moved through photography, cinema, philosophy and painting. Taken together, the family seems less like a family than a small cultural movement.

 

Santulli's pages become increasingly crowded at this point, which is part of their fascination. Fondi gives us the poet and critic Libero de Libero; Sora the art historian Michele Biancale; Alatri the Dante scholar Luigi Pietrobono and linguist Luigi Ceci. They do not all need biographies here. What matters is how often a small place opens unexpectedly onto a much larger intellectual world.

 

There are political thinkers too. Antonio Labriola of Cassino became one of Italy's important interpreters of Marxist philosophy and corresponded with Friedrich Engels. His daughter Teresa pursued a different battle. One of Italy's first women to graduate in law, she fought for women's legal and political rights at a time when the profession was hardly waiting to welcome her.

 

Santulli calls her Italy's first female lawyer. The history is a little more complicated than that title suggests, but the struggle behind it is more interesting anyway. In 1912 Labriola attempted to enter the Roman Bar. The Court of Appeal accepted her; the Court of Cassation subsequently reversed the decision on the grounds that the legal profession was not open to women. She had acquired the education necessary to practise law in Italy. Being a woman was still enough to prevent her from doing so.

 

The law eventually changed.

 

The arts provide Santulli with an even longer procession of names, and here the temptation to turn a chapter into an encyclopaedia becomes almost irresistible. But occasionally one figure demands that we stop.

 

Ernesto Biondi, born in Morolo in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a sculptor with an unusual sympathy for ordinary people. His best-known work, Saturnalia, is anything but modest: a monumental bronze group of ten life-sized figures representing the Roman festival during which normal social hierarchies were temporarily overturned. It took years to complete and won major recognition at the Paris Exposition of 1900; versions eventually found homes on opposite sides of the Atlantic, including Buenos Aires.

 

There is something appropriate about a sculptor from Morolo becoming internationally known for a work in which masters and servants briefly exchanged roles. Biondi himself was deeply interested in social questions and entered politics. His art was not confined to elegant figures for elegant drawing rooms.

 

Pasquale Fosca of Sora travelled further still, living and working in Naples, Buenos Aires and São Paulo; his sculpture entered collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Santulli even follows him to the Petit Palais in Paris, where a portrait bust associated with the Dutuit collection survives.

 

Eleuterio Riccardi of Colfelice shared the artistic world of Via Margutta in Rome with Domenico Mastroianni before spending several successful years in London as a portraitist to aristocratic and wealthy clients. According to Santulli, he later remembered those years with some nostalgia when faced with the less accommodating realities of artistic life back in Rome.

 

Amleto Cataldi, whose family came from Castrocielo, made Rome itself his gallery. His sculptures appeared across the capital, and Santulli — with characteristic enthusiasm — calls him the sculptor of Rome.

 

And then Fontana Liri produces a family name that needs no introduction.

 

Umberto Mastroianni, born there in 1910, became one of the major Italian sculptors of the twentieth century. His work moved decisively away from the figurative tradition of his uncle Domenico towards abstraction, often informed by the violence and energy of war and resistance.

 

His younger nephew Marcello Mastroianni, born in the same town in 1924, chose a rather different medium.

 

For anyone interested in Italian cinema, the list of people connected with this territory now becomes almost indecently rich.

 

Mastroianni went on to work with Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni and De Sica, appearing opposite Sophia Loren so often that the two became one of Italian cinema's defining screen partnerships. La dolce vita, 8½, Divorce Italian Style, A Special Day: the young man from Fontana Liri became one of the faces through which much of the world imagined Italy.

 

Nor was Mastroianni the only internationally familiar face with roots in this part of Italy. Gina Lollobrigida, born in Subiaco in 1927, became one of the great screen stars of the post-war era and, for a generation of audiences abroad, another face through which Italy itself was imagined.

 

A generation later, that connection crossed the Atlantic. Linda Evangelista was born in Canada to Italian immigrant parents whose family came from Pignataro Interamna, near Cassino. As one of the defining supermodels of the 1990s, she appeared on magazine covers around the world. Few people seeing her on Vogue would have had any reason to connect her with a small town in Southern Lazio.

 

Sophia Loren belongs to the story differently. She was born in Rome and grew up near Naples, and her importance here lies above all in her repeated collaboration with Mastroianni and with another figure firmly rooted in this landscape: Vittorio De Sica, born in Sora in 1901.

 

De Sica began as an actor before becoming one of the defining directors of Italian Neorealism. Sciuscià, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D. and Two Women transformed ordinary lives into some of post-war cinema's most enduring images. Two Women also brought Sophia Loren the Academy Award for Best Actress — the first acting Oscar won for a performance primarily in a language other than English.

The film has another connection with this territory. Alberto Moravia's novel was inspired by the violence suffered by civilians south of Rome during the final stages of the Second World War. The landscape behind the story was not invented.

 

Nor does Ciociaria's contribution to cinema end with De Sica and Mastroianni.

 

Giuseppe De Santis of Fondi became another major figure of Italian Neorealism. Riso amaro — Bitter Rice — made Silvana Mangano an international star, while films such as Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi — No peace under the olive tree — returned directly to the rural society and landscapes he knew. His younger brother Pasqualino became one of cinema's great cinematographers and won an Academy Award for Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

 

One brother helped shape what Italian cinema looked at. The other helped determine how the world saw it.

 

No name associated with the region's musical story, however, is more familiar today than Ennio Morricone. Born in Rome in 1928 with family roots in Arpino, he became one of cinema's greatest composers, writing music for hundreds of films across more than six decades.

 

There are few composers whose work can be recognised after only a handful of notes. The whistle from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the haunting music of The Mission, Cinema Paradiso and Once Upon a Time in America became part of the soundtrack of modern culture. Morricone could be strange, sparse, lyrical or magnificent, sometimes within the same film. He changed what generations of filmmakers and audiences thought a film score could do.

 

Cinema therefore provides a natural bridge into music, where Santulli's pages offer another remarkable collection of names.

 

Domenico Gizzi, associated with Ceccano, was an eighteenth-century singer, composer and celebrated teacher in Naples. Gioacchino Conti, known across Europe as Gizziello after his teacher, became one of the great castrati of his age, singing in the opera houses and royal courts of Europe. The nickname itself is a small monument to the relationship between master and pupil.

 

Two centuries later, Severino Gazzelloni of Roccasecca achieved international fame with a very different instrument. Born in 1919, the son of a tailor who played in the local band, he began learning the flute at seven, largely by himself. At fifteen he left Roccasecca for Rome to study at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. A beginning in a small-town band would eventually take him to the centre of Europe's musical avant-garde.

 

Gazzelloni became principal flute of the RAI orchestra and remained with it for more than thirty years, while developing an international career as a soloist. From the 1950s he was closely involved with the influential summer courses at Darmstadt, where he encountered composers including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, John Cage and Luciano Berio. His importance went beyond performing their music. Gazzelloni helped expand what composers believed the flute could do, and new works were written with his extraordinary technique in mind. Berio's Sequenza for solo flute, now one of the landmarks of the modern flute repertoire, was composed specifically for him.

 

He became known as the flauto d'oro — the Golden Flute — a nickname for his virtuosity that eventually became quite literal: Gazzelloni performed on a gold flute made especially for him. His interests ranged well beyond conventional classical music into popular music and jazz; his influence even crossed the Atlantic, where the American jazz musician Eric Dolphy named a composition Gazzelloni in his honour.

 

The boy who began playing in the local band in Roccasecca had helped give the flute a new voice in twentieth-century music.

 

And then there is Evan Gorga, from Broccostella, whose life seems to contain two careers belonging to different people.

 

As a young tenor he was chosen to sing Rodolfo in the world première of Puccini's La bohème in Turin in 1896, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. That alone would have secured him a footnote in musical history.

 

Then, still only in his thirties, he stopped singing.

 

Gorga turned instead to collecting, and did so with formidable enthusiasm. Musical instruments and archaeological objects accumulated by the tens of thousands. Much of his musical collection eventually passed to the Italian state and became a foundation of what is now Rome's Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali.

 

It is difficult not to like a man who abandoned a successful operatic career only to collect musical instruments so enthusiastically that the state eventually needed a museum for them.

 

By now Santulli's point has become difficult to miss.

 

There are more names. Many more.

 

Architects, set designers, conductors, singers, actors, scholars, photographers and filmmakers continue through Santulli's pages. Some achieved international fame; others are now known mainly to specialists. His definition of Ciociaria sometimes stretches further than everyone would accept, but he returns insistently to the same argument: the cultural history of this territory did not stop at its borders.

 

Perhaps the most important thing Santulli's lists reveal is not that Ciociaria produced an improbable number of famous people. Fame is a poor measure of a place.

 

It is the connections that are surprising.

 

Arpino leads to Cicero, but also to a painter whose workshop employed Caravaggio and to a sculptor who turned disappearing clay tableaux into images that travelled through the post. Sora leads to a cardinal writing the history of the Church, to sculpture in South America, and to Vittorio De Sica. Roccasecca gives us Thomas Aquinas and, seven centuries later, the Golden Flute. Fondi leads to poetry, painting and Italian Neorealism. Fontana Liri gives us two Mastroiannis who became internationally known in entirely different arts.

 

None of this turns Ciociaria into Florence, Paris or Rome. Nor does it need to.

 

Santulli's life's work makes a quieter and, to my mind, more interesting case: places that appear peripheral on the map have not necessarily been peripheral to history.

 

Once you know some of the people who came from them, they become rather difficult to regard as peripheral again.