Farindola

Up at Rigopiano, on the road that leads to Campo Imperatore, there are stone thòlos huts that come down from the Neolithic, and they have survived for a simple reason: the shepherds went on using them as temporary shelter all through the age of the drove roads, which only died out in the last century. In the same place, on 18 January 2017, after a heavy snowfall, an avalanche of snow and debris came down from a crest line of Monte Siella onto the hotel Rigopiano, the only hotel of the hamlet and before that a mountain refuge. Of the forty people who were inside, guests and staff, twenty-nine died and eleven came out alive; the rescuers could only arrive at dawn the next day, with the roads cut and no visibility for the helicopters. What brought the avalanche down was the snow, not the earthquake shocks of those days: the court of Milan established that too.

The borgo was founded by the Normans in the eleventh century, perched around a castle on top of the rock spur, and its fortunes were tied at once to Penne. In the fifteen hundreds it belonged to the Farnese, who installed themselves in the castle and turned it into a lordly palace; but already in the following century they came down to live in a palace inside the village, the better to administer — and that one can be visited, with paintings of the judgement of Solomon and of the four cardinal virtues. The castle, left to itself, collapsed with the giving way of the spur in the earthquake of 1933. The pecorino of Farindola has been a Slow Food presidium since 2001, and outside the built-up area the falls of the Vitello d'Oro drop more than twenty-eight metres.