Broccostella

The name of Broccostella is made of two places. The first is Brocco, the old village clinging to the hill; the second is the Madonna della Stella, the locality on the flat ground below it. A document of 1017 names the hill and a church that stood on it, but no inhabited place: people settled up there later, and in 1230 Frederick II had the little that was there destroyed. From the early twentieth century the town began to come down: houses multiplied along the river, the oldest people stayed above, and in 1915 the town hall too moved down into the valley, into a seat declared provisional. It stayed there until the fifties. The comune, in short, walked: it left the hill that had given it its name and borrowed the name of the place where it went to live.

Of the life up there scattered and precise traces remain. The fair has been held here since 1863 and has never changed its trade. The terracotta worked in the town has ended up in the national museum of the arts and popular traditions in Rome, where it is looked at as objects in a display case and no longer as kitchen utensils. The parish library holds more than seven thousand volumes, a figure one does not expect to find in a comune of this size. And there is a line of descent that has travelled a very long way: the maternal great-grandparents of the singer Lady Gaga were born here, when the town was still called only Brocco and the lower part was still fields with a church in the middle.