Castel di Sangro

Castel di Sangro has 5,985 inhabitants on the right bank of the Sangro, at the entrance to the upper valley. The name appears in the middle of the eleventh century as Castrum Sari, when a castle was raised on the Colle San Giovanni over older fortifications. In 1228 the troops of cardinal Colonna burned and destroyed both the village and the castle, to punish Rinaldo di Sangro for having backed the emperor Frederick II. For centuries the wealth of the place was sheep: the town sits at the crossing of two great droving roads, and the transhumance had to pass through here.

Two twentieth-century stories arrived instead from outside. In November 1943 the town was taken by the West Nova Scotia Regiment of the First Canadian Division: a night attack on the monastery that overlooks the houses failed against the machine guns of the German paratroopers, and it took a second assault two days later, with heavy artillery, to force them out. In 1996 an American writer, Joe McGinniss, came to spend a season with the local football club, which from a town of a few thousand people had climbed five divisions to reach Serie B: out of it came a book, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, which for many English-speaking readers was their first meeting with the name.