Valle Castellana

The official name goes back to 1285: in that year Ceresia, Sorbo, Stornazzano and Rosaio, by a public act drawn in front of the church of the Annunziata, decided to ask for the citizenship of Ascoli, and in doing so gave the valley its name — in those days villages were called castles, from the Latin claustrella, that is closed and defended places. Of those castles only ruins are left, and the most important is Castel Manfrino, near Macchia da Sole: it was raised between the twelfth and the thirteenth century on the remains of a Roman fort that watched the road which left the Salaria near Amatrice and came out, through the so-called Passo di Annibale, on the plain of Campovalano; and it takes its name from Manfred of Swabia, son of Frederick II. The same Manfred returns by another way: Dante's son Pietro, and Buti, gave credit to the idea that the Castellano is the «fiume Verde» along whose bed Manfred, in the Purgatorio, says he was buried.

Valle Castellana was the last village of the Bourbon kingdom, leaning on the border with the Papal State, and for that very reason brigandage counted for much here, from the Renaissance until about 1861. Then, in 1853, the comune did an unusual thing: it bought from the neighbouring comuni of the Papal State the villages of Vignatico, Collegrato and Valloni, on the slopes of the Montagna dei Fiori, a strip of land running from Colle San Marco towards monte Piselli, and the villages of Pietralta, Morrice and Casanova — and by buying them it carried the border of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as far as the Castellano torrent. In the same transaction it lost Forcella, Vosci and Casa Bianchini, which went the other way. Today the comune is one of two in Abruzzo, with Alfedena, whose territory borders two other regions, and a good many of its hamlets — Laturo, Lepora, Valle Pezzata, old Valloni, Collegrato, Vallecchia — are abandoned or nearly so.