San Vincenzo Valle Roveto

The comune has an upper village and a lower one, and the reason is a date: the Marsica earthquake of 1915, the one that destroyed Avezzano, gravely damaged the old centre up on its height, and the new nucleus was rebuilt further down along the Liri valley road, where the town hall moved too, into what is called San Vincenzo Inferiore. The same earthquake emptied the castle of Morrea, the stronghold to which the village's history had always been tied and which appears perhaps as early as a document of 702, under the probably corrupted name of Horrea. Along the valley road stands the church of Santa Restituta, one of the oldest in the Roveto valley: brought down by the earthquake and rebuilt in the twenties around what was left of it, wrecked again by Allied bombing in 1944 and rebuilt larger in the fifties. Through both destructions a fresco survived, painted in all likelihood between the ninth and the tenth century, which came back to light only in the seventies.

In the eighteenth century San Vincenzo was an autonomous comune; it lost that autonomy with the abolition of feudalism in 1806, was absorbed by Civita d'Antino and took it back in 1816, assuming its present name and gathering under it the villages of Castronovo, Morrea, Roccavivi and San Giovanni. The men of these places went where the work was, and in 1952 that cost the whole valley dearly: inside a diversion tunnel of a power station at Mignano Monte Lungo, in the province of Caserta, an explosion killed forty-two people, many of whom came from San Vincenzo and the other comuni of the Roveto valley. It was one of the worst disasters of the post-war years. Above Roccavivi stand the ruins of a tower raised in the tenth century by the counts of the Marsi, within sight of Morrea and of Balsorano: the fortified village that had grown around it was destroyed by a landslide in 1616.