Collelongo

The Vallelonga has been inhabited for lengths of time that make the head spin: the flints found here go back to the Middle Palaeolithic, that is about four hundred thousand years ago, and the first settled villages to the Neolithic, seven thousand years ago. But the most interesting thing comes later, in the Iron Age, when on the hills the ocres rose, fortified settlements that were independent communities, each with its own magistrates of the warrior nobility; the grave goods of the tumulus tombs say plainly that these were peoples constantly at war with one another. Only in the fifth century before Christ did all those ocres gather under a single name and become the Marsi. A people, in other words, did not exist: it was made, and it took centuries. In 302 before Christ the Marsi allied with Rome, and from that period comes the vicus of Amplero.

Amplero was found by chance. Towards the end of the nineteen sixties a local shepherd and farmer, Vincenzo Grande, came upon Italic and medieval objects, and from there the excavation campaign began. On the hill of La Giostra the acropolis came to light, with two temple buildings, a cistern for rainwater and a votive deposit: the ex-votos almost always depict female figures or models of legs and feet, and among them is a statuette of a mother nursing a child, probably a deity. At the foot of the hill lies the vicus, and at Cantone a necropolis of more than fifty tombs, used between the first century before Christ and the first after, which has allowed the reconstruction not only of funerary rites but also of the physical characteristics of those who lived there; among the grave goods is a bed of bone, today in the national archaeological museum of Chieti. Then came the Social War to cut it all down. In the Middle Ages the valley was set on its feet again by the monks of Farfa and Montecassino, and before 1220 Collelongo had a castle: Frederick II had it pulled down, together with more than two hundred others, after the assize of Capua.