Alatri historical timeline

The area of the modern city was settled as early as the second millennium BC.

Aletrium was a town of the Hernici, and it did not stand alone: together with Veroli, Anagni and Ferentino it formed a defensive league against the Volsci and the Samnites around 550 BC. In 530 they allied with the Rome of Tarquinius Superbus, confirming the Etruscan influence in the area that archaeology also attests.

Then Rome turned on them. Alatri was defeated by Rome in 306 BC and forced to accept citizenship — the same settlement, in the same year, that reduced Anagni. In Cicero's time it was a municipium, and it continued in that position throughout the imperial period.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the city decayed, the only respected authority being the Christian bishop. During the reign of Theodoric the Great the patrician Liberius promoted the construction of a monastic community here — one of the most ancient in the West, where in 528 St Benedict sojourned briefly. In 543, during the Gothic Wars, Alatri was sacked and destroyed by Totila's troops.

In the twelfth century the city became an important stronghold of the popes when they were obliged to leave the then unsafe Rome. In the following century it became a free commune — though under the authority of the bishops and the pope — governed by consuls until 1241, when a podestà was introduced.

In the centuries after that it flourished economically and expanded, conquering Collepardo, Guarcino, Trivigliano, Vico and Frosinone, though often hampered by inner strife. In the fifteenth century it began to lose its freedom, through the involvement of Ladislaus of Naples and Pope Martin V, and after the short seigniory of Filippo Maria Visconti in 1434 it had to accept papal suzerainty.

Struggles with neighbouring communes continued, and in 1556 the town was occupied by Spanish soldiers. During the Roman Republic it remained loyal to the pope. Under the Napoleonic occupation of 1809–1814 numerous members of the papal administration, along with bishop Giuseppe della Casa, were deported to France. It became part of Italy in 1870.

And during the Second World War it suffered heavy destruction and human victims.