Anagni historical timeline

Among the oldest evidence of the genus Homo in Italy is that of Fontana Ranuccio, where human remains attributed to Homo heidelbergensis and dated to 407,000 years before the present have been found. The attribution is not entirely settled — other accounts of the same site describe bone and flint objects and human teeth assigned to Homo erectus, with an older date — but the site's importance for early human presence in Italy is not in doubt.

Anagni is the ancient Anagnia, capital of the Hernici, rising on a hill between the Ernici mountains and the Sacco valley. The Hernici migrated from the Aniene valley and were descended from the Marsi, at least according to the ethnic term derived from the Marsian herna, "stone" — meaning "those who live on the stony hills". Only two words of their language survive: Samentum, a strip of sacrificial skin, and Bututti, a kind of funeral lament.

Legend counts Anagni among the città saturnie, the five Latian cities founded by the god Saturn: Anagni, Alatri, Arpino, Atina and Ferentino.

It was an important city and the spiritual centre of the Hernici, located on the acropolis and partly defended by walls in opus quasi-quadratum. In 306 BC, after the Hernician war against Rome, the towns that had not joined remained independent, while "Anagnia and such others as had borne arms against the Romans were admitted to citizenship without the right to vote" — prohibited from holding councils and from intermarrying, and allowed no magistrates except those in charge of religious rites. The city kept its religious autonomy and its strategic importance, was governed by a prefect and later became a municipium.

In imperial times many emperors spent their summers here to escape the heat of Rome — Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Commodus and Caracalla among the most notable — and the large imperial villa nearby at Villa Magna belonged to Marcus Aurelius. The city was a seat of temples and sanctuaries, including the temple of Ceres on which the cathedral was later built.

In 1160, during the struggles between Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa, the excommunication of the emperor and of the antipope Victor IV was pronounced at Anagni.

It was a free comune, and in the thirteenth century came under the lordship of the Caetani. In that period it lived a phase of extraordinary splendour, reaching about fifty thousand inhabitants, giving the Church four popes and becoming a papal residence — enough to earn it the title of città dei papi.

And then the fall. The city was the theatre of the struggle between the Colonna, King Philip the Fair of France and Boniface VIII, who was taken prisoner in the episcopal rooms of the cathedral on 7 September 1303 — the episode known ever since as the schiaffo di Anagni.