Villanova del Battista

The first name we can document for this place is Pulcarino, in a document of the twelve hundreds: it is a deformation of bulgarinus, from Bulgari, the word used for the southern Slav peoples, and it probably points to the proto-Bulgars led into Italy by the Avar chief Alzeco in the sixth century. The village was inhabited by Schiavoni, and the name stayed stuck to it: as late as 1591 it was still called Polcarino de' Schiavoni. And this was not a memory but everyday life: in the fifteen hundreds most of the people here still spoke only the Slav language, so much so that in 1584 a formal petition went to the diocese of Ariano asking for an archpriest whose mother tongue was Slav. The name Villanova, the new town, appears only in the sixteen hundreds; and «del Battista» was added by royal decree of the twenty-sixth of October 1862, in honour of the patron, San Giovanni Battista. The old nucleus, which people here still call the Paese Vecchio, stood on the hill of San Nicola; today the town spreads over three hills, seven hundred and forty-two metres up, above the valley of the Ufita, and along the ridge behind it runs the royal tratturo from Pescasseroli to Candela, a wide grassy track worn by the passing of men and flocks.

Every year, on the twenty-seventh of August, the village drags an obelisk. They call it the tiro del Giglio: the thing is built wherever there is room, it is twenty-seven metres high, it is covered with plaited straw and wheat, and it is brought into the square with ropes — and nowadays with a tractor's help — in honour of San Giovanni Battista. There used to be two: a taller one of gràlito, wild oat, about twenty-five metres and on nine levels, and a smaller one made of wheat. What stopped it all was the earthquake. On the twenty-third of July 1930 the shock destroyed the centre and left dead and injured, and the giglio was not made again for more than half a century: it was taken up again in 1986, by some villagers and by the council of the day. The earthquakes have come back again and again — the last big one in 1980 — and the mother church has been rebuilt after two of them; and on the tenth of September 1943 an air raid wrecked part of the village and killed more people. What holds here is walking: on the Sunday after the last Saturday of April they walk nine kilometres to Zungoli, and in May they walk sixty-three to the sanctuary of the Incoronata at Foggia.