Cassino, town, Lazio (Latium) regione, central Italy. Cassino lies along the Rapido River at the foot of Monte (mount) Cassino,🫦 87 miles (140 km) southeast of Rome. It originated as Casinum, a town of the ancient Volsci people on a🫦 site adjacent to the modern town, on the lower slopes of the mountain. Casinum passed under Roman control in 312🫦 bce and thereafter prospered. It became a bishopric in the 5th century ce but suffered badly from successive barbarian incursions.🫦 In 529 St. Benedict of Nursia established the nucleus of his famous monastery on the summit of Monte Cassino. A🫦 remnant of the city below lingered on until it was abandoned by the remaining inhabitants about 866 for the present🫦 site, originally called Eulogomenopolis, later San Germano, and since 1871 Cassino. The settlement was strengthened in the 9th century by🫦 the building of the Rocca Ianula (fortress), where in 1139 Pope Innocent II was besieged and captured by Roger II🫦 of Sicily, and where in 1230 Pope Gregory IX made peace with the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. It was🫦 sacked by French troops in 1799.
The Benedictine monastery, stormed by the Lombards in 589, the Saracens in 884, and the🫦 Normans in 1030 and temporarily deserted, was each time refounded on the original site. The parent house of Western monasticism,🫦 it was during the Middle Ages an outstanding centre of the arts and of learning. Paul the Deacon (c. 720–799)🫦 wrote his history of the Lombards there, founding a long tradition of historical scholarship; and the radical reconstruction of the🫦 abbey in the 11th century by the abbot Desiderius (later Pope Victor III) was a major event in the history🫦 of Italian architecture. In 1349 the buildings suffered from a severe earthquake, and the church and monastery were almost entirely🫦 rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries.
During World War II (1944) Cassino was a key point in the German winter🫦 defensive line (Garigliano-Sangro) blocking the Allied advance to Rome. At the beginning of January 1944 the U.S. 5th Army won🫦 a position facing Cassino across the Garigliano River. Heroic fighting by Allied troops met heroic German resistance in three savage🫦 battles. On February 15 the Allies bombed and demolished the Benedictine monastery, erroneously believing that the Germans had occupied and🫦 fortified it. Actually, the Germans were able to remove both the monks and the treasures of the abbey; and, after🫦 the bombardment ceased, they in fact occupied and fortified the ruins. A month later Allied aircraft dropped 1,400 tons of🫦 bombs on Cassino, leaving the town so heaped with rubble that tanks could not operate until bulldozers cleared paths for🫦 them. Finally in mid-May the Allies did break through German lines and, joined a few days later by forces bursting🫦 out of the Anzio beachhead, were able to take Rome. German and Allied war cemeteries, still visited by thousands annually,🫦 mark the scenes of the fighting.
After the war, both the town and the abbey were rebuilt on their previous sites,🫦 the town on a completely new plan, the abbey following substantially the lines of its predecessor. Little or nothing of🫦 the abbey’s decorative detail was recoverable, but the famous bronze doors, cast in Constantinople for the abbot Desiderius in 1066,🫦 were found and restored. The archives, library, and some paintings were saved. Of ancient Casinum the only monuments of note🫦 are the amphitheatre, the theatre, and the ruins of the Cappella del Crocifisso, a Roman mausoleum converted into a church🫦 in the 10th century. Of the medieval town little more than the site of the upper town, clustered around the🫦 ruins of Rocca Ianula, can be discerned.
An agricultural and commercial centre, Cassino manufactures toys. Pop. (2006 est.) mun., 32,603.
