Pratola Peligna

Pratola Peligna has 7,840 inhabitants in the Peligna basin, on the left bank of the Sagittario. From 1294 to 1807 it had no baron but an abbot: Charles II of Anjou assigned the fief to the monastery of Santo Spirito del Morrone, and for five centuries the town belonged to the Celestines — the arch that leads into the old centre still bears their emblem, a snake coiled round the cross. That did not make the people of Pratola meek: they rose in 1799 against the French invasion, in 1848 against the constitution of Ferdinand II and in 1934 against Fascism.

The town's devotion is to the Madonna della Libera, and it was born of a plague in the sixteenth century: a villager named Fortunato found on the hill, beside a small temple ruined by an earthquake, an image of the Madonna, asked her to free Pratola from the contagion and was granted it. The icon, which is of the fifteenth century, can still be read well: the Virgin stands with her hands joined and her mantle, raised by two angels, shelters the kneeling faithful, the women on one side and the men on the other. Among them one can make out a pope, who is perhaps Celestine V, the hermit of the Morrone on whom the town depended.