Castelvecchio Subequo

Under Castelvecchio there was Superaequum, one of the three capitals of the Peligni, together with today's Corfinio and Sulmona. What remains of it is in the village itself: mosaic floors, the remains of a temple dedicated to Hercules Victor, baths, aqueducts and fortifications, and a catacomb cemetery of the fourth century, among the oldest Christian evidence in Abruzzo. And the village used what it found. The church of Sant'Agata is built over a Roman bath complex, beside the temple of Hercules, and the great moulded stones ranged along its eastern side were perhaps the podium that served as the base of the Christian building; the portal of Santa Elisabetta mixes baroque mouldings with Roman reliefs found in the area of Superaequum — two women at the sides holding up the jambs with their backs, and above the architrave an angel's head between two wings; and in the wall beside the entrance of the mother church a Roman epigraph is set which recalls the repair of the aqueduct that carried water to Corfinium.

In the Lombard age the place was called Onuffolo, or Nuffoli, and it took back its own name under the Normans; the definitive Castelvecchio dates from 1484. Tradition has it that Saint Francis passed through the Subequan territory in 1216 and that pope Celestine V stopped here in 1294. It was a fief of the counts of Celano, then of the Piccolomini, of the Colonna in 1633, of the barons Pietropaoli in 1712 and of prince Urbano Barberini in 1789. To the Barberini the mother church owes the shape it has: in 1745 they had the architect Fontana pull down the old church — recorded in 1073, when the lords Gisone and Guglione gave it to the monastery of Farfa — and rebuild it with three naves. But the building that towers over everything is the Franciscan complex, with church, convent and cloister: inside are rare fourteenth-century frescoes of the Giottesque school which tell, panel by panel, the life of Saint Francis. In front of Sant'Agata, finally, there is a fourteenth-century fountain for watering animals, held to be miraculous: on the fourth of February the rite is still performed there.