Schiavi di Abruzzo

The village stands at more than eleven hundred metres, on a spur of monte Pizzuto, on the border with Molise from which the river Sente divides it, and by tradition it is counted part of the Sannio. Two hundred metres lower down, in the valley, are its Italic temples: two sacred buildings raised from the third century before Christ by the Pentri, one of the four Samnite peoples, in an area that lies a short way from Pietrabbondante and from the ancient Terventum. In Roman times some inscriptions suggest that there was a municipium here. The name, on the other hand, tells another story: Sclavi appears for the first time in a document of 922 and has been linked to the founding of the village by people of Slav origin; in Norman times the place was the fief of one Roberto da Sclavo, and from the seventeenth century until the abolition of feudal tenure it belonged to the Caracciolo of Santobuono.

The numbers of Schiavi tell the twentieth century of half of southern Italy. In 1861 the inhabitants were three thousand six hundred and fifty-seven; between 1861 and 1914 mass emigration to the Americas emptied the fields, and yet the population reached its peak in 1961, with four thousand five hundred and twenty-six residents. Then the collapse: today they are fewer than a thousand, and three quarters of them live in the nine districts scattered in the valleys, not in the old centre on the top. The war memorial, of about 1920, carries the names of seventy-seven dead and missing of the First World War; the plaque for the forty-four of the Second was added later. In that war the territory found itself close to the Barbara line and became a trench-observatory for the Germans, who had a firefight with the local people; and in 1943 some anarchists from Schiavi, Salcito and Trivento put together a partisan formation, the Porfirio band. In the old centre there is also a former Waldensian evangelical church, active until the second war, which since 2008 has housed the library and archive of the Archeo Club.