Saracinesco

Two explanations compete over this village's name, and they do not agree. The first says it comes from the saracinesca, the portcullis that was lowered to bar the way to enemies, and denies that Saracens ever reached up here: the Arabs, it argues, never pushed north of Apulia. The second tells the opposite: that after the Arab raid on Rome of 846 a group cut off from the main force took refuge on this outcrop, converted to Christianity as a condition of surrender and was allowed to stay. The name appears in an inscription of 1052 as Rocca Sarraceniscum, and the town's coat of arms bears two Saracen heads above a castle.

The village stands at nine hundred metres on the summit of a spur of the Monti Ruffi, its lanes paved with limestone and the remains of an eleventh-century fortress above. Among the houses an open-air museum of sundials has been laid out, the museum of time, and the idea was conceived partly as a tribute to the ancestors, since in the Middle Ages the Arabs were held to be the best mathematicians. In August, moreover, the passage of Conradin of Swabia is re-enacted in procession.