Roccaspinalveti

Roccaspinalveti is not where it used to be. Today's village is a nineteenth-century one, and the reason is simple: the old settlement, which in the seventeen hundreds was called Rocca Spina Oliveta and later just Roccavecchia, was sliding, and it was evacuated and rebuilt further down the valley, laid out on a grid of cardines and decumani in the manner of the time. Of the old one you can still make out the feudal palace, the church and a few houses. Higher up, on a peak of Monte Trimonte, above eleven hundred metres, stands the medieval borgo, now reduced to a ruin: it controlled the approaches of the rivers round about and from a distance commanded the valleys of the Trigno and the Sangro, but it had a flaw — sitting halfway up the slope, it was open to attack from above. Some of the houses were built as walls, with a twisting entrance for anyone who wanted to get in, and there were two gates: the Porta a Capo and the Porta a Piedi, the gate at the head and the gate at the foot. The arms too are a small riddle: a palm tree between the letters R and S, the initials of the two elements that make up the name.

The church of San Pietro, in the Rocca district, appears for the first time in 1050, when a certain Bruno names it in a deed of donation as an income of the abbey of the Santissima Trinità; from 1386 it was placed under the church of Santa Vittoria, and in 1568, when Giovanni Oliva, archbishop and count of Chieti, came on his pastoral visit, it was already a ruin. Today the perimeter walls come up out of the rubble, a rectangle of about seven metres by twelve, and the old people of the village say the floor is still down there. The church in use, instead, is San Michele Arcangelo, of 1850, built over an earlier chapel, with a seventeenth-century organ whose pipes are threaded through the cornice by way of the capitals. On the sixteenth of January, the eve of Sant'Antonio abate, groups go about the streets playing traditional instruments and telling the episodes of the saint's cult: they call it lu sand'Andonie. People live by livestock — sheep, cattle, pigs — and by the trade in animals, plus potatoes, wheat and wine grapes; there is a village dairy and there are firms making hams and cured meats.