Corvara

Corvara stands six hundred metres up beneath Monte Aquileo, which people here call La Queglia, and its old village rests directly on the rock. In 1956 the historic centre was declared at risk of landslip and the inhabitants had to leave: the late medieval village stayed empty for some forty years, until at the end of the nineteen-nineties it was declared fit again, and since then it has been restored house by house, together with the university of Chieti and the Gran Sasso national park. The houses are the ones they call pagliare here, all of stone, which also served as stables for the pack animals.

Two things in the old village are worth the climb. The bell tower of Sant'Andrea, a square tower of the fourteenth century, still stands attached to a stretch of wall: it is all the earthquake of 1933 left of the church. And in the front of an ordinary house a Romanesque portal of the twelfth century is built in, with its round arch and small columns with composite capitals, most likely taken from that same church and set where it was needed. The village, renamed Acitrullo, is also the set of a film by Maccio Capatonda.