Pratola Serra

Pratola Serra has 3,708 inhabitants in the valley of the Sabato and holds two villages together: Serra, the older one, grown on the hill around the castle, and Pratola, stretched along the right bank of the river on the old road to Apulia. The name is a diminutive, from the Latin pratulum, a little meadow; the single comune was born in 1812. That road also led to the Bourbon prison of Montefusco, and passing along it brought bad luck: «puozzi passà p'a Pratola» has stayed a saying, and today it gives its name to a festival.

In January 1981, digging to lay the prefabs meant for the earthquake victims, at Pioppi-Saudelle the walls of a large building came out: it was a church of the Lombard age, and beneath it the remains of a Roman villa with its baths. On Easter Monday the Calata degli Angeli takes place: three children dressed as angels, hung from a wooden support stretched between two houses on via Roma, sing to the Madonna. In the flat part of the comune, where in the nineteen-eighties the Arna was being built, Fiat later set up a large engine factory.