Roccamorice

Above the village, inside the wall of the Maiella, there are two hermitages. San Bartolomeo in Legio, on the boundary with Abbateggio, is set into the rock and is reached by a narrow entrance that follows the grooves of the mountain; hermit monks were living there already in the eleventh century. Santo Spirito a Maiella is more a monastery than a hermitage, because only the pronaos is inside the stone: it housed Victor III before he became pope, and in the thirteenth century it housed Pietro da Morrone. Of him it is known that he was in these parts already in the first half of the century, when he was still brother Angelerio: the man who would become pope Celestine V and who after a few months would renounce the papacy, the only pope to do so by his own choice before our own day. The hermitages he had chosen in order to be alone have stayed where he left them.

The village, instead, stands on a spur that divides the valleys of the Lavino and the Avinello. In 1066 the chronicle of the monastery of San Bartolomeo di Carpineto calls it Rocca Morica, elsewhere Rocca Mauritii; then it changed hands many times, from the count of Manoppello to the Di Letto, to the Orsini, and at last to the Valignano of Chieti, who held it until 1741, when it passed to the barons Zambra. Of the castle there remains the church of the Baron, built in the sixteenth century inside a squat square tower: today it houses an art centre with more than seventy paintings. And up above, at Colle Civita, are the tholos huts, circular stone buildings with a hollow entrance that belonged to a Neolithic village: the shepherds of the transhumance went on using them all through the middle ages.