Barisciano

Just outside the village stands the Franciscan convent of San Colombo, of the fourteenth century, and what is kept in it today is seeds: it is the seat of a research centre for the flora of the Apennines, which studies and preserves about two hundred and thirty-five varieties, mostly Apennine ones, plus another forty-six of native farm species, and holds a herbarium of forty thousand specimens. In another church of the village, that of the Immaculate Conception, there is instead the documentation centre of the transhumance — which is the other thing this place lived on: from the fifteen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds Barisciano lived by its flocks, because the drove road passed here. And pasture was worth quarrelling over: all through the fourteenth century the village was in dispute with the neighbouring barony of Carapelle for possession of the grazing, and those lawsuits dragged on into the nineteenth century.

The village grew in the eleventh century around a walled castle on the hill, rectangular in plan, with corner towers and the houses inside the walls; in 1254 it took part in the founding of L'Aquila, and its castellans occupied the eastern part of one of the city's quarters. On the twenty-third of April 1424, during the war of L'Aquila, Braccio da Montone attacked it. The people tried to hold out inside; the castle was destroyed down to the walls, the inhabitants were made slaves, and the women were taken to the camp, violated and then made to walk to L'Aquila together with their children. The village remained part of L'Aquila until 1529 and then passed to noble families; by the sixteenth century the castle had lost its function and was abandoned, damaged by the earthquake of 1703 and stripped of its stone to build the new houses down below. In 2009 the western tower came down as well, the best preserved of the whole circuit. Older than all of it are a stone of 58 BC, now at L'Aquila, and a little church whose name, Forfona, still carries the memory of the temple of Jupiter it is thought to stand on.