Castelli

Just outside the village, on a slight rise, stands the church of San Donato, born as a cona, that is a country chapel, and enlarged at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inside, the ceiling is made entirely of painted maiolica tiles, twenty by forty centimetres each: there were about a thousand of them, eight hundred remain today, and they were made around 1615 to 1617. In 1963 Carlo Levi called it the Sistine Chapel of maiolica, and the comparison holds, because there is nothing like it anywhere else. The making is attributed to the potters of the Pompei family, but every decorator in the village worked on it, and it shows: on the tiles are heraldic symbols, apotropaic animals, religious phrases and sayings, flowers and simple geometries. The broken or damaged tiles are in the ceramics museum, opened in 1984 in the former Franciscan convent and named after the potter Francesco Antonio Saverio Grue.

That all this happened here is no accident. After the end of Rome the inhabitants of the valley gathered into fortified castra which they called Li Castelli, and from that comes the village's name; for centuries they were under the Benedictine abbey of San Salvatore, now vanished and first mentioned in 1117, when pope Paschal II confirmed its privileges and possessions. It was thanks to the Benedictines that the villagers learned to work clay — and the clay was right there, in quantity, in the hollows of the hills above the houses. From an agro-pastoral society Castelli became a society of merchants, and from the sixteenth century its polychrome maiolica was collected across half of Europe, with dynasties of master potters such as the Grue and the Gentili. In the parish church of San Giovanni Battista there is a thirteenth-century wooden Madonna and Child, which comes from the vanished monastery and was carved after French models. The masters, meanwhile, followed one another: the counts of Pagliara, the Orsini from 1336, general Hernando de Alarcón to whom Charles V gave the village in 1527, and the Mendoza until 1806. The earthquakes of 1703 and of 2009 both passed this way.