Villavallelonga

The village stands at a thousand metres on the Colle dei Cerri, inside the national park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, and with that park it has a blood tie: in 1873 some of its former feudal mountains, privately owned — Pratillo, Fossetta and Macchiatavana, on the Serra Lunga — formed the first nucleus of the royal reserve of Alta Val di Sangro, which is the park's ancestor. The park was inaugurated in September 1922, and already in October Villavallelonga was among the founders of the Condotta forestale marsicana, the first of its kind in Italy, wanted and presided over by Erminio Sipari. In the Val Cervara, moreover, there is a beech wood that in 2017 became a world heritage site together with other European beech forests: it is one of the oldest on the continent, with trees more than five hundred and sixty years old, and it is home to the Marsican brown bear, the Apennine wolf and the chamois. It was the first UNESCO recognition for Abruzzo.

In the church of the Madonna delle Grazie are kept the relics of don Gaetano Tantalo, born here in 1905. He was parish priest at Tagliacozzo, and in 1943, after the roundup in Rome, he hid seven people of the Orvieto-Pacifici family for nine months: with them he celebrated the Jewish Passover, taking care to obtain and keep the unleavened bread for that feast. In 1976 Yad Vashem declared him Righteous Among the Nations, and in Jerusalem a tree bears his name; he died in 1947. The rest of the village's story is that of the Marsica: the earthquake of 1915 destroyed the oldest urban core and killed about seventy people, with two hundred injured. On the seventeenth of January, for Saint Anthony Abbot, the Panarda is still held, the great ritual banquet of the village; the patron, San Leucio, is celebrated on the second of September.