Celenza sul Trigno

In the plain of the Trigno, at the place called Macchie la Fara, stands a Lombard tower of the eighth century: a cylindrical plan, and it served to keep an eye on the river. It is the oldest thing in the comune, and also the only one left standing of those that made Celenza a fortified place. The village came into being between the ninth and the tenth century, and the walled borgo is of the twelfth; in feudal times it belonged to Odorisio di Sinibaldo from 1272, then in 1451 it passed to Marino Caracciolo as the dowry of his wife Maria di Sangro, in 1464 king Ferrante of Aragon ceded it to Marino lo Scappuccino, and on the death of the last Caracciolo it ended with the d'Avalos. The mother church of Santa Maria Assunta was probably the medieval chapel of the castle, later enlarged until it became the main church: of the old phase there remain the Gothic reliefs of the front and of the ciborium, while the rest is late baroque. The bell tower, detached and medieval, was finished in 1792 and holds bells from the old Marinelli foundry of Agnone.

Of the castle, which stood beside the church near piazza del Popolo, nothing remains: it was demolished as early as the nineteenth century. Of the walls only stretches can be seen, reused as the base of some houses, and of the two gates — Porta da Capo and Porta da Piedi — only the names in the street plan have survived. Below the borgo, in the fifteenth century, the poor quarter of the Riccella had grown, with its straw-roofed houses. In the second world war Celenza found itself on the Trigno line and had to be rebuilt: the twentieth-century rebuilding, the village itself says, took away much of its splendour, beginning with the anonymous refacing of many rural houses in brick. Walking along via Vittorio Emanuele II, though, the medieval plan can still be read. Already in the nineteenth century the built-up area had begun to move further north, onto flat ground, along corso Umberto I. The former convent of San Donato, built in 1528 in late Renaissance style with a square cloister, is today a rest home for the elderly.