Torrebruna

From the top of the mountain above the village, at one thousand one hundred and fifty metres, you can see everything: the valley of the Trigno, the Maiella, the villages of Molise, the Gargano, the Adriatic and, on good days, the Tremiti islands. Of the name, on the other hand, nothing certain is known. One legend says it comes from an old tower set at the highest point of the village, darkened by time; another tells that in that tower lived a noblewoman named Bruna, and that people said «Bruna's tower». The same story explains the neighbouring village too: the few inhabitants of the time were supposedly her guard, that is the guard of Bruna, whence Guardiabruna — which since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been a hamlet of Torrebruna. Two villages with the name of a woman who perhaps never existed. In 1202 the documents count the hearths, that is the households; then the feudal lords followed one another, from the Caracciolo to the dukes of Celenza sul Trigno and on to the d'Avalos.

The village of Torrebruna is built in concentric rings, with the parish church at the highest point: it stood watch over the Ateleta-Biferno drove road and the pass of Forca delli Colli, and probably everything began with a lookout tower and its enclosure. Of the walls there remain the lower gate, called della Mirella, and the wall-houses of via Orientale, with a round scarped tower of 1320 like those of Monteodorisio; despite the landslips of the nineteenth century and the demolitions that followed, the lanes and the covered passages still hold. At Guardiabruna, instead, there is a fortified palace of the Piccirilli, on top of a steep crag: the walls and buttresses of the southern side are built directly on the rock, loopholes open onto the courtyard, and inside are the cellars, the rooms that served as a prison and the wall paintings in the kitchens of the main floor. Beside it stand the ruins of the Benedictine church of Santa Vittoria. In the church of the Transfiguration, in the village, there is a gilded wooden organ of the eighteenth century by Antonio Ciavarelli; the bell tower, finished in 1766, was demolished in 1951 and rebuilt at the end of the nineties.