Torre de' Passeri

The name is the tower of the crossing, Turris Passum: it stood where the river Pescara split into many rivulets shallow enough to be crossed with a step or little more, and at night a lamp was lit there to help travellers over — a crossing that had to be paid for with a toll. In the Chronicon Casauriense the place is Bectorrita, and in 1097 a Norman count obtained the custody of its tower from the abbot of San Clemente a Casauria; in 1111 it returned to the monastery. In 1652 the village became a possession of the marquises Mazara of Sulmona, and it was a baron of that family who made it grow: he gave land, building material and money to anyone who wanted to build a house and to anyone who wanted to move in and open a business. That is why families of potters came from Castelli, and the Torrese ceramics they started lasted until the early decades of the twentieth century.

On the morning of the fifteenth of March 1950 the men and women of Torre took up their tools and went to repair by themselves, unpaid, the mule track that linked the village to Pietranico: it was a reverse strike, the post-war form of protest in which people worked for nothing in order to demand work. The clashes with the police ended in twenty-four arrests, dozens injured — women and children among them — and convictions; the case reached the national press, the courts and Parliament, and was then forgotten. On the fifteenth of March 2025, exactly seventy-five years later, the village named a square after it. Above the houses stands the castle that the marchioness Smeralda began in 1719 over the old watchtower, damaged by the earthquake of 2009 and reopened ten years later: since 1979 it has housed an institute of Dante studies. And in one of the village houses is kept the archive of Corradino D'Ascanio, with the designs of his helicopter.