Palena

The name of Palena probably comes from pala, a meadow on a steep slope, and it is an honest description of the place. The Lombards colonised these mountains in the ninth century and brought here the cult of Saint Michael the Archangel, founding a chapel at the cave of Sant'Angelo. In 930 the monk Giovanni of San Vincenzo al Volturno records in the Chronicon Vulturnense the church of Santa Maria de Palena, with a plot of land beside it for the people's work. In those same years San Falco settled at Palena, died here and was soon venerated as the protector of the possessed and the slothful: a patron saint for those who cannot get themselves going. An account of 1587 tells of the feast of the palii of San Falco, on the thirteenth of January, when the faithful ran barefoot over the stones of the mountain. In the eleventh century the territory was not a village but a handful of ville, groups of shepherds' houses — Castelcieco, Castello Alberico, Forca Palena, Pizzo, San Cristinziano, Sant'Egidio — and by the fourteen hundreds not one of them existed any more: the earthquakes had brought them down.

This mountain, though, has above all taken people in. In 1235 friar Pietro da Morrone, who would become Celestine V, went into hermitage in a cave on the pass of the Forchetta, on the boundary between Palena and Campo di Giove; a few years later, by the will of Charles of Anjou, a proper hermitage was built there, divided in two: a fortified building to house pilgrims and a smaller one for worship. The church of San Falco too, brought down by an earthquake, was rebuilt bigger precisely to hold more pilgrims. Then came the war years, and Palena was one of the Abruzzo comuni that the fascist authorities designated as a place of civil internment for foreign Jewish refugees. In November of 1943 the Germans occupied the village, which lies on the line of the Gustav, and used it as a prison camp: and yet all four Jewish internees managed to escape capture and to reach the areas of the South already liberated. The village was then bombed by the Allies, and of the church of San Falco only the bell tower was left; the rebuilding was finished in 1953. Of the station, on the other hand, they still say it is in the wrong place: when the railway arrived in 1897 they put it above the village instead of below, for convenience.