Roccaraso

Roccaraso was born around the year one thousand by the torrent Rasinus, and lived off fields, flocks and workshops; by the end of the sixteen hundreds it even had a theatre, put up by the Angeloni and held to be the oldest civil theatre in Abruzzo together with the one in L'Aquila. Then the village found itself on the Gustav line. The Germans arrived in September 1943 and, since the plateau is flat, they cut the woods and piled the trunks across the roads and at the gates of the village to stop the Allies: two thousand trees in all. On 3 November came the order to evacuate, with Sulmona named as the shelter. When the Allies took Castel di Sangro, the houses, the palaces and the churches were mined and blown up: of the medieval borgo there remained shreds of the wall of the church of Sant'Ippolito, the bell tower and the façade. The hamlet of Pietransieri holds the gold medal for military valour, for the massacre of the Limmari and for what its people did in those months.

What Roccaraso is today begins instead with a railway: the Sulmona to Isernia line, opened in 1897 through the efforts of a local senator, brought Naples within reach. Skiing arrived in 1909, discovered by a group of journalists; then came a ski club among the first in Italy, one of the first sledge-lifts up to Monte Zurrone, inaugurated by a prince of the house of Savoy, and a guidebook of the time that already counted nine hotels. Rebuilt from nothing after the war, the village is among the largest mountain resorts of the Apennines: so much so that on one weekend of 2025 it was submerged by thousands of visitors who came for the day after some videos on social media, and the mayor spoke of an assault.