Roccascalegna

On the arms of Roccascalegna there is a rung ladder, and it is the most widely accepted explanation of the name: the rocca with the wooden ladder, the one that led from the village straight up to the castle tower. Other scholars prefer other roads — the Catalogus baronum of 1379 writes Rocca-scarengia, and scarenna is said to mean crag, the flank of the spur on which the stronghold stands; some go back to the Lombard Aschari. Lombard, indeed, is the first core of the castle: it was raised as a watchtower over the Riosecco valley, against the Byzantines, and only later became the fortress one sees today, on a spur with ravines on either side. In 1320 the village is already named «cum castellione», and in 1525 Giovanni Maria d'Annecchino had it rebuilt, because firearms had arrived in the meantime.

The story of the lords ends badly more than once. On 15 October 1584 the villagers, oppressed by Orazio Carafa, rose and, helped by the priest, killed him; his brothers succeeded him, and by the end of the century the Carafa, deep in debt, had to sell the castle. After them came the Corvo, or de Corvis, and with them the legends. One tells that in the mid-seventeenth century a baron of that family imposed on his vassals the veneration of a black crow — those who refused ended up in the dungeons — and tradition connects it to an ancient Roman veneration of crows, with a parallel worth drawing: the ravens of the Tower of London. Another, which the village still tells, says that a Corvo tried to restore a tax like the ius primae noctis, and that somebody — a man or a woman, nobody knows — got into the castle by night in the bride's place and killed him. The last lords, the Nanni, abandoned the stronghold for a more comfortable palace lower down, and the castle fell into ruin; in 1985 the family gave it to the comune, and the restoration, finished in 1996, gave it back. Matteo Garrone shot a film there.