Some places seem to exist long before we ever visit them.

 

Their names alone evoke images carefully assembled over centuries. Tuscany suggests rolling vineyards, Renaissance cities and cypress-lined roads. Venice recalls canals, palaces and reflections on still water. The Dolomites have become synonymous with jagged limestone peaks glowing pink at sunset. These landscapes occupy a permanent place in our imagination, not only because they are beautiful, but because generations of painters, writers, photographers and filmmakers have returned to them, each adding another layer to the story we already believe we know.

 

Then there is Ciociaria.

 

For many travellers, the name means nothing at all. Even among Italians, it can prompt uncertainty. Some associate it with the Province of Frosinone, others with the countryside south of Rome, while many recognise the word without being entirely sure what it describes. Unlike Tuscany or Umbria, it appears on no official map of Italy. There are no road signs announcing that you have entered it, no administrative boundary separating it from the regions around it.

 

It is a curious beginning for a place that was once so familiar to the rest of Europe.

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A name without borders

 

The difficulty begins with the name itself. Ciociaria has never had fixed borders, and its meaning has shifted over time. Depending on whom you ask, it can describe a relatively small area around Frosinone or a much broader cultural landscape stretching across the hills and valleys south of Rome. Historians, writers and geographers have drawn its boundaries in different ways without producing a definition on which everyone agrees.

 

Part of the explanation lies in history. For centuries this landscape was divided by the frontier between the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples. Those political divisions influenced administration, dialect and local loyalties, some of which remain surprisingly strong. 

 

I discovered how complicated this can still be over dinner with local friends. When the subject of Ciociaria came up, one of them, from Sora, immediately objected: “I am not from Ciociaria. I am from Sora.” Another brought up the old Terra di Lavoro, while a third explained that the dialect of Sora still contains words reflecting the long Spanish influence on the Kingdom of Naples.

 

The conversation moved on, but the point stayed with me. Identities that appear reasonably tidy in books become considerably less tidy around a dinner table.

 

Then there is the traditional costume and, most famously, the cioce: the simple leather sandals from which the name Ciociaria is generally believed to derive. The historian Michele Santulli, whose work has done much to restore interest in the region, places considerable importance on these shared traditions. In his interpretation, historic Ciociaria was a cultural landscape whose rural communities had much in common despite belonging at different times to different states.

 

There is something persuasive in that idea, even if the borders remain impossible to draw neatly. People crossed them constantly. They went to markets, moved livestock, found seasonal work, made pilgrimages and married into neighbouring communities. Governments ruled from Rome or Naples; everyday life had its own geography.

 

Today the official map says Southern Lazio. Ciociaria survives as a historical and cultural idea, interpreted differently according to where one stands and, sometimes, whom one asks.

 

That uncertainty makes what happened here in the nineteenth century all the more surprising.

 

There was a time when Ciociaria was among the best-known rural landscapes in Europe.

 

Long before organised tourism, travellers came here in search of something they believed was disappearing elsewhere. Artists filled sketchbooks with its people. Writers described its villages. Paintings of shepherds, pilgrims and village women from this region found their way into museums, galleries and private collections across the continent. Their faces appeared in Paris, London, Munich, Vienna and St Petersburg.

 

Millions have admired them since, usually without knowing where they came from.

 

The landscape that produced those images was not an easy one. The hills and valleys south of Rome were generous enough to sustain life, but rarely generous enough to make it comfortable. Forests provided timber, rivers watered fields and fertile pockets of land produced olives, vines and grain. Few families could depend upon farming alone. Shepherding, seasonal migration and temporary work elsewhere formed part of life for generations.

 

Necessity shaped clothing as well. It had to be practical, durable and suited to long days in the fields, tending flocks or walking steep tracks between villages. Over generations, these garments developed into something distinctive and remarkably harmonious, without anyone setting out to create a regional costume.

 

Those who wore them gave little thought to their appearance. They were dressed for the lives they led.

 

Visitors saw something else.

 

Young painters arriving in Italy had come to study Roman ruins, Renaissance masterpieces and the idealised beauty of classical sculpture. Instead, many found themselves fascinated by living communities whose clothing, customs and appearance seemed to belong to an older rural world that was disappearing across Europe. What local people regarded as ordinary, the artists saw as remarkable.

 

Among the most distinctive features were the cioce. To the people wearing them, they were practical footwear. To painters from Paris, Munich, London and Vienna, they became one of the most recognisable details of rural Italy.

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The artists arrive

 

Many of these painters had followed the well-established route of the Grand Tour. Italy represented the culmination of an artistic education, and Rome was its natural centre. There they expected antiquity and Raphael. They also found shepherds, farmers and village women arriving every day from the countryside.

 

The people came to Rome for much less artistic reasons. They sold produce, sought work, visited relatives and made pilgrimages to the city's churches. Rome had long been part of the economic life of the surrounding countryside. Nobody was travelling there in the hope of being immortalised on a canvas.

 

For the artists, however, they were difficult to ignore.

 

As European painting turned increasingly towards scenes of everyday life, models from the villages south of Rome became sought after. Students at the French Academy at the Villa Medici painted them, as did artists from Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and elsewhere. For local families, posing could provide a modest source of additional income. For the painters, these men and women seemed to embody the rural Italy they had hoped to find.

 

Paintings, drawings and engravings carried their faces across Europe. In the process, the figure of the Ciociaro became far better known than the place from which he or she had come.

 

Santulli’s research has traced the identities and origins of many of these models. Imagine standing before one of Cézanne’s paintings of the Boy in a Red Waistcoat and learning that the young Italian model, Michelangelo di Rosa, came from Atina. Or seeing Matisse’s Carmelina without knowing that the woman looking back at us was Carmela Caira from Gallinaro. Another native of Gallinaro, Cesidio Pignatelli, travelled to Paris and became the model for Rodin’s Saint John the Baptist. Rodin later recalled being immediately struck by the appearance and physical presence of the Italian peasant who arrived at his studio looking for work.

 

Among the models in this Parisian circle was the elderly Maria Caira. According to a story retold by the writer Octave Mirbeau, she had walked from Italy to Paris at the age of eighty-two to see her son one last time. The Musée Camille Claudel treats the journey as a legend, but her presence in the studios left a tangible record. She posed for Jules Desbois’ La Misère and is also identified as the model for Rodin’s Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière and Camille Claudel’s Clotho.

 

In La Misère, she crouches beneath a scrap of cloth that scarcely covers her body. Her lowered head and folded limbs convey poverty and vulnerability without the comfort of picturesque costume. These artists found a subject in the marks of age, giving an elderly woman the attention more often reserved for youthful beauty.

 

In London, the Colarossi family, whose roots lay in Picinisco, became part of the same remarkable story. Angelo Colarossi and his son worked as artists’ models, and the younger Angelo supplied the figure for Alfred Gilbert’s winged statue at Piccadilly Circus, commonly known as Eros. Members of the family posed for other prominent artists and sculptors in Britain as well.

 

The works became famous; the villages behind the people who posed for them largely disappeared from the story. Knowing these connections changes the way places such as Atina, Gallinaro and Picinisco are seen. Someone who has admired these works in the great museums and public spaces of Europe and America suddenly has another reason to wonder about the small villages from which their models, or their families, came.

 

The attraction went further than costume. Industrialisation was transforming much of Europe, while life in these hills still followed patterns that had developed over centuries: agriculture, religious festivals, seasonal work and the movement of flocks between mountain pastures and the plains. Traditions survived because they were still useful, not because anyone had decided they ought to be preserved.

 

There is an irony here. Poverty slowed change, and that very lack of change became part of what outsiders admired.

 

The paintings and engravings produced during those years therefore preserve more than picturesque clothes and handsome faces. They record a rural society at the moment before the twentieth century began to alter it beyond recognition.

 

Those images still hang in museums today.

 

Few of the people looking at them realise that they are also looking at the forgotten face of Ciociaria.

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Beyond the canvas

 

Painters were not the only visitors who became interested in the hills south of Rome.

 

The German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius travelled through the region during the nineteenth century and looked well beyond its monuments. He wrote about the people, their customs and the relationship between history and landscape. What interested him was not a collection of isolated villages, but a countryside in which communities shared much despite centuries of political division.

 

Several decades later, D. H. Lawrence passed through the Valle di Comino under very different circumstances. It was the winter of 1919. Europe had just emerged from the First World War, empires had collapsed and the confidence of the nineteenth century had suffered a considerable shock.

 

Lawrence was drawn less to grand monuments than to the life he encountered in the villages. But by then the world that had fascinated earlier travellers was changing. Traditional costume was becoming less common, roads were improving and younger generations increasingly looked outside agriculture for their future.

 

This did not mean that the region had previously been isolated. Quite the opposite. For generations its inhabitants had travelled in search of work. Some became craftsmen, traders or labourers; others travelled as musicians. The zampognari, with their bagpipes and pifferi, were a familiar sight in Rome during Advent and attracted the attention of foreign visitors, including Charles Dickens. By the early nineteenth century, people from these communities could also be found in Paris, London, Edinburgh and Manchester.

 

The villages might have looked remote on a map. Their inhabitants were not.

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When a name began to fade

 

Places rarely disappear overnight. More often, they fade so gradually that nobody can point to the moment when it happened.

 

Ciociaria did not vanish. Its villages remained, its monasteries continued to overlook the old roads, and farmers still worked land cultivated by generations before them. What disappeared was the familiarity of the name and, with it, much of the recognition the landscape had once enjoyed outside Italy.

 

The unification of the country helped change the way Italians thought about geography. The new state organised itself through provinces and, later, regions that did not necessarily correspond to older cultural landscapes. Tuscany fitted comfortably into the new map. Ciociaria did not. The name became increasingly associated with the Province of Frosinone, while Southern Lazio offered the tidier administrative description.

 

Tourism was changing too. Railways, motorcars and eventually commercial aviation made Italy accessible to an ever larger public, but travel increasingly became organised around destinations that could be easily recognised and described. Florence had the Renaissance, Venice its canals, Pisa its tower and the Amalfi Coast its cliffs and sea. Ciociaria was more difficult to reduce to a postcard.

 

Its interest lay in the relationship between things: villages and monasteries, Roman roads and medieval frontiers, mountain pastures and agricultural valleys, local saints and distant rulers. No single monument could explain it. The pleasure came from understanding how one place connected with another.

 

The twentieth century then altered the landscape more profoundly. Traditional occupations declined. Everyday clothing became much the same as elsewhere in Italy, and the cioce, once ordinary footwear, retreated into museums, festivals and historical processions.

 

War did considerably greater damage.

 

During the Second World War, Southern Lazio became one of the principal battlefields of the Italian campaign. Montecassino Abbey was reduced to rubble before being painstakingly rebuilt. Bombing and fighting damaged towns throughout the region, while post-war reconstruction erased further parts of historic centres, including much of old Sora.

 

And still, an extraordinary amount survived.

 

Walk through Atina, Alvito, Veroli or Alatri and the past does not have to be reconstructed entirely from books. It remains in the pattern of the streets, in churches positioned where communities have gathered for centuries, in old walls incorporated into later buildings and in the relationship between the hill towns and the land around them.

 

These are not museums preserving a vanished rural Italy. People live here, park their cars in medieval streets, complain about roadworks, buy bread, renovate houses and go about ordinary twenty-first-century lives in places whose history is considerably older than the country to which they now belong.

 

That may be part of their appeal.

 

Southern Lazio has remained outside the main current of international tourism for so long that much of its character has developed without needing to accommodate it. The result is not an untouched world — no inhabited part of Italy is — but something more interesting: a landscape in which many of the connections that fascinated earlier travellers can still be recognised.

 

The forgotten heart of Italy was never truly lost.

 

We became less accustomed to recognising it.​​