Pietrelcina has 3,081 inhabitants on a hill on the right bank of the Tammaro, a short way from Benevento. The name comes from the old Pietrapulcina, and the town appears for the first time in the twelfth century in the writings of Falco of Benevento. Its history is that of many inland villages: the earthquake of 5 June 1688 that brought down the churches, the cholera of 1854 that decimated the population, the feudal lords who followed one another until feudalism ended. Then, in 1887, in a house in the old centre, Francesco Forgione was born, and from that point on the history of Pietrelcina is a different one.
The Forgione houses can still be visited, and they are tiny. In the bedroom where he was born there is a trapdoor in the floor that led down to the store where the donkey was kept, the one his father used to go out to the fields. He was baptised the day after his birth, in the church of Sant'Anna, and under the altar of that church lie the relics of a Saint Pius martyr, given by the Carafa in 1801: it was those that suggested to the friar the name he would take. Outside the town, at Piana Romana, the chapel built where he used to pray preserves the elm under which he received the first stigmata. The Capuchin convent, on the other hand, was paid for by an American benefactress, Mary Pyle.
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📅 Every year, on 3 December
Pietrelcina celebrates Our Lady of Liberation on 3 December. The town, which each year draws a substantial pilgrimage of the faithful, was the birthplace of Padre Pio.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
