The church of San Michele Arcangelo, the oldest in Vittorito, was founded by the Lombards on the ruins of a Roman temple, and the two things can still be seen one above the other. In the excavations of 1970 the foundations of a second-century temple came out, with the cella in opus reticulatum that held the cult image; and the sills of the small windows of the front are blocks taken from the crowning of that temple's podium, reused just as they were. Inside, the altar has a Gothic tabernacle with a cross vault painted with fifteenth-century frescoes: in the cells the four evangelists at half length, on the walls four standing saints — among them Saint Catherine with the wheel of her martyrdom — and on the front the Annunciation, with the ray of light coming from the angel and the dove going towards the Virgin. On the right two eighth-century slabs are kept, one from an ambo and one from the presbytery screen: on one an eagle flies gripping a lamb, above it a Greek cross among plant interlaces, and on the edge is carved URSU, that is the name of the stonecutter. A craftsman who signed his own work twelve hundred years ago.
In 1076, says the Chronicon Casauriense, Vittorito had a fortress on the rocky spur that overlooks the village, and a tower beside it. Before the Maiella earthquake of 1706 the village was divided into Borgo Superiore and Borgo Inferiore, Renaissance in layout; that quake damaged San Michele again, which got a new front and an altered interior. The parish church, Santa Maria in Borgo, was built in the fifteenth century in what was then the outskirts and finished in 1511, as an inscription inside says: on its stone portal are three sixteenth-century frescoes, the Madonna enthroned with the Child, Saint Erasmus in bishop's robes and Saint Christopher, protector of pilgrims. After 1706 the naves went from two to three. In the yard of San Michele, in 1854, a dig brought out a mosaic and many worked brackets; and in the side wall of the church is set a Roman epitaph for Lucius Sarius Felix, a young decurion of the people of Corfinium, who lived thirty years, six months and ten days: it was placed there by his father, his mother, his brother and his sister.
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📅 Every year, on 3 February
On 3 February Vittorito celebrates its patron Saint Blaise; the calendar continues with the Madonna del Borgo in May, Saint Roch in September and chestnuts in November.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Vittorito, but an easy day trip away.
