Calascio

For centuries there were two villages here with two different trades: Calascio, on the flank of the mountain along the road; and Rocca Calascio, higher up, clinging to the castle that commands Campo Imperatore and the plain of Navelli. The earthquake of 1703 emptied the Rocca, and almost everyone came down to Calascio. The castle, with its white tower and four round bastions, was restored at the end of the twentieth century and has served more than once as a film set.

The name appears as early as 816, in an imperial document listing the property of the monks of Volturno, and comes from a pre-Latin root meaning «steep mountainside». The houses of the village are tower houses: a very small base and five or six floors going up. In the Grottoni, just outside, together with flints and the bones of prehistoric animals, the head of a Neanderthal femur was found, eighty thousand years old.