From ironworks to vineyard

 

 

At Rosanisco, below the old centre of Atina, wine is made inside an ironworks built for a vanished kingdom. The long façade still has the assurance of a public building. Arched windows run along the walls, the Bourbon emblem remains carved in stone and part of the old blast furnace survives. The rooms once used as workshops, stores and offices now contain fermentation tanks, barrels and bottles of Cabernet.

 

The contrast is striking, but not contrived. La Ferriera has been a place of production for most of the history that matters here. What changed was the material: first iron drawn from the surrounding mountains, later wine from vines growing in the valley.

 

Both required someone to believe that this relatively isolated part of Italy could produce something worth sending beyond its borders.

 

In many villages of Southern Lazio, large houses and former industrial buildings offer glimpses of an economy that is now difficult to imagine. Their stone entrances, balconies and shuttered façades belonged to landowners, professionals, merchants and industrial families whose activities once provided work for a much larger population. Paper, wool, textiles, mining and agriculture all generated periods of prosperity, though never for everyone and never without uncertainty.

 

La Ferriera brings several strands of that history together. Its story begins with Bourbon engineers and an ambitious experiment in iron. It passes through the Visocchis, a family involved in paper, politics, agriculture and wine, and continues with the Mancinis, who preserved the old industrial complex and gave it another productive life.

 

A royal ironworks

 

Iron had been worked in the mountains around the Valle di Comino long before the nineteenth century. Deposits rich in limonite and bauxite occur among the limestone of the Meta and western Marsica ranges, sometimes close enough to the surface to be recognised and exploited with relatively simple methods. Archaeological evidence suggests very early activity, while mining is more securely associated with the Samnites by around the fourth century BC.

 

The connection entered literature through Publius Vergilius Maro, better known as Virgil, the Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid during the reign of Augustus in the first century BC. In its seventh book, as the cities of Latium prepare for war, Virgil names Atina potens—powerful Atina—among five places forging new weapons.

 

Poetry is not an industrial survey. Even so, the reference suggests that Atina’s association with metalworking was familiar enough to require no explanation for a Roman audience.

 

The furnaces of that distant period were relatively simple. Ore and charcoal were heated in small structures positioned where the wind could assist the draught. At the end of the firing, part of the furnace might have to be demolished to retrieve the resulting mass of iron. The process was slow, wasteful and interrupted after each cycle.

 

The mineral alone was not enough. Smelting demanded forests from which charcoal could be made, a reliable supply of water, skilled labour and some way of carrying ore down from the mountains. The Valle di Comino possessed the first three in abundance. Transport was another matter. The terrain that held the mineral also made it difficult to reach.

 

During the eighteenth century, the Bourbon government began looking more seriously at these resources. The Kingdom of Naples imported iron wire, cannon and other metal products from countries including Germany and Sweden. Producing more of them at home promised economic savings, but the principal concern was military. Iron and cast iron were needed for weapons and for the expanding Royal Navy.

 

In the 1770s, the discovery of deposits in the Canneto Valley drew official attention to the western slopes of the Meta mountains. Ferdinand IV commissioned the architect Mario Gioffredo to examine the quality of the ore and assess the forests, water and terrain. Gioffredo concluded that an ironworks was possible.

 

Officials were unconvinced. Gioffredo believed so strongly in what he had found that he agreed to risk his own money. If the undertaking failed, the loss would be his; if it succeeded, he would share in the profits.

 

It was an extraordinary wager.

 

The forge he built near the sanctuary of Santa Maria di Canneto began operating in 1785. Skilled artillery workers came from the royal ironworks at Mongiana in Calabria, bringing experience unavailable locally. The plant produced soft iron for civilian use, artillery shells and other cast objects.

 

Canneto soon defeated them. The narrow valley was beautiful but inhospitable, particularly in winter. Snow and severe cold isolated the workers, while the poor roads made every stage of production more difficult. Ore and fuel had to be brought to the furnace; finished iron had to be taken out. Questions were also raised about the quality of some of the raw material and the resulting product.

 

The government took over the forge in 1789. Ten years later it was in ruins.

 

Other proposals followed. One suggested combining the mineral deposits of the mountains with the waterpower of the Liri at Isola, where a large foundry, nine forges and an iron-wire factory might reduce the kingdom’s dependence on imports. The political disorder surrounding the Parthenopean Republic and the subsequent French invasion prevented the scheme from advancing.

 

The idea of an iron industry in the valley nevertheless survived. In 1852, renewed military demand and advances in metallurgy brought Bourbon specialists back to the area. They examined old workings, surveyed the geology and planned roads as well as mines. Two principal mining districts were identified around San Donato Val di Comino and Campoli Appennino, with other deposits near Canneto, Picinisco, Settefrati, Alvito and Pescosolido.

 

The first response was to revive the forge at Canneto. Roads were improved, buildings restored and work resumed in 1853. Three years later it was abandoned again. Better management could not alter the geography.

 

The government now needed a site that remained connected to the mines without being trapped among them. Giovanni Rossi, an engineer in the Bourbon department of bridges and roads, found it at Rosanisco. The chosen ground lay close to the Melfa, whose water could provide power, and only a short distance from the road joining Sora to San Germano, the present-day Cassino.

 

Construction began in 1854. A channel diverted water from the Melfa into a reservoir. From there it drove a waterwheel connected to a horizontal blowing machine with two cylinders and pistons. This forced a continuous stream of air through pipes and into the base of the furnace, allowing it to reach and maintain temperatures far beyond those of the ancient low-fire process.

 

The arrangement reconstructed in the surviving plans shows how carefully the site was organised. Limonite from the mountain mines arrived with charcoal and limestone, which served as a flux, helping separate impurities from the iron. The materials were carried to the elevated charging level and fed into the top of the furnace in alternating layers. The shape of the ground and buildings allowed the furnace to be approached at different heights: raw materials entered above while the finished product emerged below.

 

As the charcoal burned, the mechanically driven blast intensified the heat and the chemical reaction within the furnace. Molten iron descended towards the bottom; the lighter slag floated above it. Each could be released through a separate opening. Crude iron was then cast or taken for further working.

 

The crucial difference was continuity. Earlier furnaces commonly had to cool or be broken open before the iron could be removed. The tall furnace at Rosanisco could be recharged from above while molten iron was tapped at its base. Water from the Melfa supplied the power, but machinery controlled the air on which the entire process depended.

 

Workshops, casting areas, stores and administrative rooms were arranged around this system. La Ferriera was not a single furnace with a collection of outbuildings. The channel, reservoir, waterwheel, blowing cylinders, charging floor and internal routes formed one integrated industrial machine.

 

By the standards of the valley, it was an extraordinary technological leap. Its design drew on contemporary European furnace practice, including the type illustrated in technical drawings by Tomas and Laurent around 1850. It would be excessive to claim that Rosanisco stood at the forefront of European metallurgy, but there can be little doubt that the Bourbon government was attempting to install modern industrial production in a place previously associated with small mines, charcoal and difficult mountain roads.

 

The Royal Ironworks of Atina was inaugurated in June 1858. Its furnace produced an average of approximately 3,100 kilograms of crude iron each day. After decades of surveys, false starts and investment, the kingdom finally had a working metallurgical complex in the valley.

 

Its timing could scarcely have been worse.

 

In 1860 Garibaldi landed in Sicily and advanced north. The Bourbon kingdom collapsed, and its territories were absorbed into the new Kingdom of Italy. By the end of that year, the Rosanisco ironworks had closed. The buildings were abandoned and plundered; the surviving property passed to the new state and was listed among the assets to be sold.

 

La Ferriera had taken four years to build and worked for little more than two.

 

Its closure is sometimes drawn into the larger argument over the economic consequences of Italian unification. The history of the divide between northern and southern Italy is too complex to rest on a single factory. Some industries in Southern Lazio continued to prosper after 1861; others struggled with poor transport, limited capital, new competition or technologies they could not afford. Political upheaval mattered, but it was never the only force at work.

 

What remains remarkable is the speed with which one vision of progress became stranded. The furnace at Rosanisco had been designed to supply a kingdom that ceased to exist almost as soon as production began.

 

For eighteen years the complex waited for another purpose.

 

Paper, vines and the Visocchis

 

In 1878 the former ironworks was acquired by the Visocchi family. By then, their name had become associated with a distinctive combination of land, industry, agricultural experiment and political influence.

 

Pasquale Visocchi was born in Atina in 1817 into a large and prosperous family. He was one of at least six brothers, several of whom would later share responsibility for the family’s industrial properties. An uncle, Francescantonio Visocchi, was Bishop of Gallipoli and helped direct Pasquale’s early education. After attending the Collegio Tulliano in Arpino, he continued his studies in Naples, where his interests included literature, botany and agriculture.

 

The death of his father brought him home. Pasquale was still in his early twenties, with younger brothers and family property now requiring his attention.

 

He did not return merely to administer what he had inherited.

 

Work on a paper mill beside the Melfa began in the early 1840s. Pasquale collaborated with Pierre Poche, a Frenchman who travelled to France to obtain machinery and technical knowledge. The factory was formally inaugurated in May 1845, and Pasquale’s brothers became closely involved in its management and development.

 

Paper was not a new industry in this part of Italy. Amalfi had helped introduce papermaking to the Italian peninsula during the Middle Ages, while Fabriano refined its methods and became known throughout Europe. The Liri valley possessed its own long tradition. In 1516 the Abbey of Montecassino commissioned a mill at Sant’Elia Fiumerapido, partly to supply the material required by its scriptorium. Other mills followed at Carnello, Picinisco, Sora, Isola del Liri and along the smaller rivers of the area.

 

Water explained their presence. It was essential to the preparation of the fibres and, with the mechanisation of production, supplied the force needed to drive increasingly complex equipment. Isola del Liri became the largest and best-known centre, but it formed part of an industrial district that extended through several valleys.

 

The Visocchi mill grew into a substantial concern. By around 1870 it employed approximately 120 people and produced about 3,200 quintals of paper annually—320 tonnes. Its output was valued at 370,000 lire, equivalent in purchasing power to roughly two million euros today. Any such conversion across a century and a half is necessarily approximate, but the workforce and quantity of paper are enough to show the importance of the enterprise.

 

This was not a modest mill serving a nearby market. It depended on imported machinery, specialist knowledge, organised labour and connections capable of carrying its products elsewhere.

 

The family expanded. Around 1870, the Visocchis acquired half of the Bartolomucci paper mill at Borgo Castellone, near Picinisco. This older establishment produced more than twenty kinds of paper and maintained a commercial warehouse in Naples. Its workers had been trained by French specialists, and Lorenzo Montgolfier, a member of the family associated with the invention of the hot-air balloon, had once served as its director.

 

Between 1876 and 1890, the Bartolomucci-Visocchi mill employed around ninety people and reportedly struggled to keep pace with demand. In 1906 the Visocchis acquired the remaining half of the property. Together with the mill at Atina, it placed the family among the important paper manufacturers of the district.

 

Pasquale also entered public life. He served as mayor of Atina before unification and later represented the district on the provincial council of Terra di Lavoro. His brother Alfonso became a deputy and senator in the new Kingdom of Italy. Achille Visocchi, belonging to the following generation, also entered parliament and held government office.

 

The family’s politics resist a convenient tale of Bourbon prosperity destroyed by outsiders. Members of the Visocchi family had supported liberal and unifying ideas, and they became prominent within the state that replaced the Bourbon kingdom. Their success after 1861 came from an ability to move between old landed influence and new forms of industry, science and politics.

 

Pasquale was most original in agriculture. He experimented with green manure, planting different species and observing their effect on depleted soil over a period of years. His results were shared with agricultural institutions, and he maintained an interest in methods being developed outside the valley. Agriculture, in his hands, was not a body of inherited habits but a field for investigation.

 

The vineyards offered another experiment.

 

Wine had long been made around Atina, much of it for household or nearby consumption. Pasquale believed the soil and climate could support varieties associated with more celebrated regions. From around 1860, he introduced French grapes that included Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon and Sémillon.

 

There was no established market for Atina Cabernet because Atina Cabernet did not yet exist. The vines had to be imported, planted and observed through successive seasons before anyone could know how they would respond to the valley’s soils, altitude and climate.

 

Pasquale was creating a product and its reputation at the same time.

 

In 1868 the Stabilimento Enologico Fratelli Visocchi opened at La Posterula, beside one of the ancient approaches to the historic centre. It was equipped with modern vats, oak barrels and specialised machinery. Grapes arrived from vineyards in Atina, Gallinaro, Alvito and Sant’Elia Fiumerapido, and trained oenologists contributed to the development of the wines.

 

The quantities were considerable. The establishment could process as much as 4,000 quintals of grapes in a year: 400 tonnes, enough at ordinary extraction rates for approximately 350,000 to 400,000 standard bottles. In 1928 it reached a record of 4,600 quintals, or 460 tonnes.

 

Not all that wine would necessarily have left the cellars in bottles, but the comparison gives a sense of the operation. This was far more than a landowner’s private experiment. Visocchi wines travelled elsewhere in Italy and reportedly reached Canada and Australia.

 

The purchase of La Ferriera in 1878 therefore came during a period of remarkable expansion. The family now possessed interests in paper, wine, land and a former state industrial complex. What use they made of the old ironworks is not well documented. The Visocchi winery remained at La Posterula, and there is no reason to assume that wine immediately replaced iron at Rosanisco.

 

La Ferriera was one part of a much larger family enterprise.

 

Industrial success did not remove the need to adapt. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, European papermaking shifted increasingly towards wood pulp and cellulose. The new materials and machinery favoured companies capable of investing heavily and producing on a larger scale. Mills closer to major markets and transport networks held an advantage.

 

The effects could be abrupt. The Bartolomucci-Visocchi mill, which had employed around ninety people and struggled to satisfy demand, reportedly had only ten workers by 1896. Its decline did not mean that paper itself had lost its importance. The methods, scale and geography of the industry were changing.

 

That process continues. Many of the historic mills of the Liri valley have disappeared, but Italian papermaking has not. Italy remains one of Europe’s largest producers of paper and board, with 151 operating mills in 2024. Modern plants bear little resemblance to their nineteenth-century predecessors. Production is automated and highly specialised; recovered fibres are carefully measured and graded; water and energy are monitored throughout the process. Recycled paper now supplies a large proportion of the fibre used by Italian mills, while the country recycles more than ninety per cent of its paper and cardboard packaging.

 

A modern paper mill would be almost unrecognisable to Pasquale. The willingness to improve machinery, study materials and learn from elsewhere would not.

 

Wine followed its own course. The Visocchi establishment survived into the twentieth century and achieved its highest recorded production in 1928. War then struck a landscape that had little protection from it. The fighting of 1943 and 1944 damaged buildings, vineyards and markets throughout the area, and the Visocchi wine enterprise never recovered its former scale. Land was gradually sold and the winery at La Posterula eventually ceased production.

 

The company disappeared, but Pasquale’s experiment did not. Cabernet and Syrah had taken root in the valley. Other growers continued to cultivate them, and more than a century after the first plantings they became the foundation of the Atina wine denomination.

 

The Visocchi name left the label. The grapes remained.

 

From furnace to vineyard

 

In 1947 La Ferriera was acquired by the Mancini family, who remain its owners. The industrial architecture endured: the long walls, arched openings, furnace, waterworks and Bourbon emblem.

 

The Mancinis preserved the essential character of the complex. Its origins were not hidden beneath an imitation of a rustic wine estate. The modern cantina was introduced into former storerooms, offices and working spaces, allowing the building’s two productive lives to remain visible beside one another.

 

Armando Mancini belongs to this later history, but his life deserves a fuller and properly sourced account. His La storia di Atina, eventually enlarged to more than 1,280 pages, reveals an exceptional commitment to preserving the town’s past. He was also an entrepreneur, participated in politics and directed Parco Ferriera, an extensive private zoological park once established on the property. These apparently disparate parts of his life suggest a man of unusual energy and curiosity. They will be developed when the recorded account of his life becomes available.

 

Within La Ferriera, preservation was accompanied by production. The estate now cultivates around twenty hectares of vineyards divided between La Ferriera and Colle Alto. The vines grow at approximately 350 metres, where the difference between daytime and night-time temperatures allows the grapes to ripen gradually while retaining their acidity and fragrance.

 

Cabernet remains central. La Ferriera follows the old Visocchi combination of Cabernet and Syrah for its principal Atina wines, creating a direct connection with the nineteenth-century plantings. It is not the continuation of the former Visocchi company; it is a separate Mancini enterprise. The inheritance lies in the varieties, the knowledge accumulated around them and the belief that the valley can produce serious wine.

 

The name of its best-known red, Realmagona, reaches back still further. A magona was a works in which raw mineral received its first processing, and the Bourbon complex at Rosanisco was known as the Real Magona di Atina. The name on the bottle retains the furnace within the winery’s modern identity.

 

The wine itself deserves attention. Atina Cabernet remains rare outside its home territory, but rarity is not its only distinction. The altitude, limestone-rich soils and marked changes in temperature give the wines structure without sacrificing freshness. Cabernet and Syrah, varieties introduced from elsewhere, have been cultivated here long enough to become part of the agricultural identity of the valley.

 

La Ferriera’s bottles have repeatedly been selected by important Italian wine guides. Gambero Rosso has recognised the estate across a number of editions, while the Italian Sommelier Association’s Vitae guide selected several of its wines in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Realmagona 2021 took third place in its category at the 2024 Premio Roma. The recognised wines include not only the estate’s Cabernet and its riserva, but also Semiato, a white based on Sémillon, and a sparkling Realmagona.

 

These distinctions confirm what the setting alone cannot: the conversion of La Ferriera into a winery has produced more than an attractive historical backdrop. The wines are accomplished, distinctive and capable of being judged alongside serious bottles from much better-known Italian regions.

 

The French vines first planted by Pasquale Visocchi were once an experiment. They are now among the strongest expressions of the valley.

 

La Ferriera has passed through three acts of belief. Bourbon engineers believed that ore, forests and water could support a modern iron industry. The Visocchis believed that machinery, agricultural science and unfamiliar vines could create businesses reaching beyond Atina. The Mancinis believed that an old industrial complex could be preserved without becoming static, and that its next productive life could emerge from the land around it.

 

Political upheaval ended the ironworks almost as soon as it opened. New technology transformed the paper industry. War damaged the vineyards and broke the continuity of the Visocchi winery. None of this makes the ventures meaningless. Progress seldom follows the orderly course imagined by those who invest in it.

 

At Rosanisco, the evidence of their confidence remains unusually complete. The Melfa still runs near the buildings chosen for its waterpower. The Bourbon emblem survives above masonry built for the furnace. Inside, wine made from the descendants of Pasquale’s vines rests in rooms intended for another industry.

 

The fire has gone out. The belief in what the valley can produce has not.