Pescasseroli

Benedetto Croce was born here in 1866 and came back for the first time in 1910, at the age of forty-four. In the speech he gave from the balcony of palazzo Sipari he apologised to his fellow townsmen for not having come sooner, and explained why: he had been afraid. As a child he had listened to the stories his mother, Luisa Sipari, told him, and on those he had built himself a most beautiful imaginary town; he feared that seeing the real one would spoil it. Instead he said that reality was better than the dream, and that Pescasseroli had seemed to him more beautiful, wider, gayer and even more civil than he had imagined it. Then he made a prediction: that within a few years the name of his town would become familiar to everyone, because holidaymakers and walkers would come here from every quarter. He was right, but he was not merely a seer: having become minister of public instruction, he himself presented a bill of protection. Today the administration of the national park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise has its seat here.

Croce also dealt with the name of his own town, in a monograph he entitled simply Pescasseroli. That pesclum meant a high and steep place — the crest where the ruins of the castle stand — was clear; about the rest none of the current explanations convinced him, neither the serra nor the little serra that runs down from the mountain towards the river. He proposed instead to read Pesclum ad Serolum as the rock beside the Sangro, which rises not far off and flows below it while still small: Sarolus, the little Sangro. The town is the terminus of one of the longest drove roads of the south, the one that leads to Candela in the Tavoliere for two hundred and eleven kilometres, and has been since Samnite times. The castle on the hill was abandoned in the fourteenth century for the settlement growing in the valley.