Lama dei Peligni

The name of this village is made of two halves that are not worth the same. Lama is pre-Latin and means land where the water stands: that is the old, certain part. The addition «dei Peligni» is far later and refers to the Italic people said to have pushed as far as the Aventino, but the source itself warns that the datum is disputed and that one can hold the Peligni never really lived in these territories, being natives of the valley of Sulmona; here, as in nearby Torricella, the people were the Carecini. What is certain lies much further back: in the caves of the area there are rock paintings, there are the remains of a Neolithic village, and in the Fonterossi district, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there came to light the so-called man of the Maiella, the remains of a prehistoric burial datable to between the seventh and the fifth millennium before Christ. The parish church, on the other hand, carries on its bell tower an inscription with the date 1589.

The rest is the mountain. The village stands at just under seven hundred metres, at the southern foot of the Maiella and inside the national park, and naturalists call it the village of the chamois. Not far off is the Grotta del Cavallone, the highest natural cave in Europe open to visitors, at nearly fifteen hundred metres, and it is the cave in which D'Annunzio set La figlia di Iorio. To cross the Aventino several bridges were built and all of them have fallen but one, which they call the iron bridge: an iron skeleton with wooden planks laid over it, salvaged from railway sleepers. The Middle Ages here are made of hermitages, and at the hermitage of the Sant'Angelo cave lived the blessed Roberto da Salle, a disciple of Celestine V, who in 1327 founded the convent of Sant'Antonio da Padova; wool came with the Renaissance. Then earthquakes and the war destroyed the village all over again, and on the thirty-first of January 1944 it was freed from the Germans: the men of Lama were in the Maiella brigade.