Roccamontepiano

In 1765 an enormous mass of rock broke away from the Maiella and crushed the village below: about six hundred people died. The old settlement stood high up, on the Montepiano, and it was not rebuilt where it had been: the village of today grew lower down, and it is a scattered comune, made of several settlements — Borgo San Rocco, where the sanctuary is, and then Cappuccini, Cinquina, Giancamillo, Sant'Angelo, Terranova, Tracanna, Baroni, Manicottelli. Of the old village only a few buildings survived the landslide: the monastery of San Pietro, the convent of San Francesco and three small churches. The medieval rocca did not, and what is known of it comes mostly from paper — including the maps that the Arab geographer al-Idrisi drew for the king of Sicily, where it appears as Ruqqa N Lan; fourteenth-century documents call it Rocca Montis Plani.

The village had been born around a Lombard fortress set to defend the eastern side of the Maiella, and between the tenth and eleventh centuries the Benedictines colonised it. The monastery of San Pietro was founded in the thirteenth century by Roberto da Salle, a follower of Pietro da Morrone — the hermit who became pope as Celestine the fifth — and it is dedicated to him; it declined in the fifteen hundreds, and the Poor Clares were put there because there were no longer enough friars. After the Celestines were suppressed it was abandoned altogether, and today it is an archaeological site where the plan can still be read whole on the ground. The other religious house, the convent of San Francesco Caracciolo, was for three hundred years the chief monastery of the comune, was suppressed in 1861 and later given back to the Franciscans; in 1338 a friar from here, Antonio Cervi, was elected rector of the entire Franciscan province of Abruzzo. And the sanctuary of San Rocco, rebuilt in the nineteen fifties, stands over the grotto where the saint is said to have stayed and where the old church stood until the rock came down.