Pacentro

In 1170 the Catalogue of the Barons of the Kingdom of Naples records that Pacentro is inhabited by forty-eight families: it is one of those figures that put a whole village into a single line. Above the houses stands the castle, built by the Normans in the eleventh century and partly destroyed by Frederick II; the man who set it up again and strengthened it was Jacopo Caldora, in the fifteenth century, and it takes its name from him. It was one of the main strongholds of the Peligna valley, together with Popoli and Roccacasale. On the north-east tower there is a frieze with the figure of a woman, perhaps Rita Cantelmo, Jacopo Caldora's mother; the battlements are still the ones damaged by the earthquake of 1706, and in the nineties, when the castle was at risk of collapse, it was held up with concrete buttresses.

The village, though, is also worth looking at from street level, because it has a mania for keeping itself. There is Casa Marlurita, a plain medieval house that belonged to Maria Loreta Pacella and that has become a museum of itself, with the nineteenth-century furnishings of an ordinary family; there is the Morrone pasta factory, an eighteenth-century building used for making pasta from 1880 and today visitable with its twentieth-century machinery; there is the fountain of piazza del Popolo, in front of the parish church, with its octagonal basin and a human face carved on every panel; and there is the washing fountain, on the climb to the castle, where people did their laundry until the middle of the twentieth century. Another house is known for different reasons: Casa Ciccone, which belonged to the grandparents of the singer Madonna. The most deeply felt tradition is the corsa degli zingari, a barefoot foot race held on the first Sunday of September in honour of the Madonna di Loreto, for which the young men of the village climb the slopes of colle Ardinghi.