The hills around the town are held up by hand. They are called macére: dry-stone walls built to terrace the slopes and plant olives on them, and they are not a few hundred metres but hundreds of kilometres, spread over the whole hilly surface surrounding the built-up area. In 2011 the macére entered the one hundred and twenty-three sites of the national register of historic rural landscapes promoted by the FAI together with the Council of Europe and UNESCO; then the comune, with a local cooperative, prepared a dossier for the ministry of agriculture, which in 2017 inscribed them in the register of the historic rural landscapes of Italy under the name of the terraced olive groves of Vallecorsa. The town sits on a hill at the foot of Monte Calvilli, in the Monti Ausoni: Volscian land, then Roman, then Lombard, it appears in eleventh-century documents as Valis cursae, already with a castle and a walled circuit almost the same as today's. It grew beyond the walls when the refugees came from the abandoned castles of Ambrifi and Acquaviva, and the gonfalone still has twelve bands, green white and red, for the twelve districts the town was divided into.
Here, in 1805, Maria De Mattias was born, who founded the congregation of the Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ and a convent in the town, died in Rome in 1866 and was proclaimed a saint in 2003. In the Second World War, as the front passed through, the inhabitants suffered the violence known as the marocchinate, the mass rapes committed by colonial troops enrolled in the French Allied contingent: among the places struck was the convent of the sisters of the Precious Blood, and the count of the women raped in this comune alone reached one hundred and one. For those sufferings Vallecorsa received the gold medal for civil merit by decree of the President of the Republic. In the town, meanwhile, old rites remain: the terle, wooden instruments with toothed wheels that replace the bells during Holy Week, and the fires of Holy Saturday, still lit by striking the steel on the flint.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Vallecorsa celebrates Saint Michael the Archangel; in 1960 director Vittorio De Sica filmed a scene of Two Women, which won Sophia Loren an Oscar, at the local church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
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.
Outside Vallecorsa, but an easy day trip away.
