San Giovanni Lipioni

On the top of the village, where the church built in 1504 now stands, there was once a pagan temple: it is named in the Oscan tablet of Agnone, one of the best-known Italic inscriptions. In 1847, in the fields round about, a bronze head of the third century before Christ was found, and it is kept today in the National Library of France, in Paris. The name, meanwhile, has changed several times: first Sanctus Johannes a podio Bacco, then San Giovanni Lupino, and only in the seventeenth century the present one.

The village is built comb-fashion along a ridge, with the alleys running down at right angles to a central street, and the walls are gone but the place remembers them in its names: there is still a via sotto le mura, the street below the walls. What remains instead are the wall-houses, with battered masonry and supporting arches, and the service lanes that pass under porticoes, up steps and through covered passages. The old fountain was restored four times between 1808 and 1844, the last time in order to go and find again the water veins that had been lost.