Prezza

The castle of Prezza was one of the main fortresses of the Peligna valley, set to guard the road that came down from the Cocullo pass, and the fief — then called Villa Carrene — belonged to the abbey of San Clemente a Casauria. The Chronicon Casauriense tells what happened there in 1097. For thirty years a Norman captain, Ugo known as Malmozzetto, that is «ugly mug», had been going about Abruzzo besieging and plundering strongholds, with the idea of leaving each of his seven sons a castle or a county; he had lately driven out the lord of Prezza. That lord's sister, whom the chronicle calls beautiful and clever, asked him for a meeting on the pretext of arranging her own marriage to one of the barons under him, seduced him and had him seized by her brother: the Norman stayed a prisoner just long enough for all the castles of the area he had occupied to be freed.

The name of the village, instead, has changed skin several times. In Roman times the settlement was the Pagus Laverna; in the fifteenth century the fief was called Rocca di Sale, because of the tithes paid to hold it, and only two centuries later did it take the form it has today. Of the castle almost nothing is left: it was thrown down by the earthquake of 1706, which left standing only the bell tower of the mother church of Santa Lucia. The saint is the patron, and in the village they tell you why: her statue was to be carried elsewhere, but the mule that bore it would not hear of leaving Prezza, and so they kept her. The village sits on a spur that looks over the whole valley — they call it the terrace of the Peligna valley — and below it ran the drovers' road to Sulmona; at the station on the line to Pescara, on the other hand, since the first of January 2017 no train stops any more.