Castelvecchio Calvisio

This village did not grow by chance: it was planned. Born in the twelfth century, it has an oval plan closed by walls with square towers, and inside the streets cross on the pattern of a cardo and a decumanus, perhaps inherited from a Roman layout. You enter through three gates, one round-arched, one pointed and carrying the clock, and a seventeenth-century one opening onto the Captain's palace. It is one of the best preserved medieval centres in the whole area.

Just outside the built-up area stands the church of San Cipriano, the parish church until the fifteenth century: it is Romanesque, but it sits on the remains of a pagan temple dedicated to Venus, and in its stones pre-Roman, Roman and medieval inscriptions can be read. The village's castle and churches already appear in a chronicle of 779. The comune, by contrast, is a recent thing: lost under the French and merged first into Capestrano and then into Carapelle, Castelvecchio regained its autonomy only in 1906, and its present name was given it by a royal decree of 1883.