Anyone stepping into Larino's town hall to sort out paperwork walks past a Roman funerary aedicule without always noticing it: two busts, a man and a woman, and an inscription naming them — Caius Gavius Scipio and his wife Optata. They stand in the entrance hall, on the left. The Palazzo Ducale on Piazza Roma is exactly that kind of building: a town hall that has never stopped being something else as well.
It began as a Norman castle, raised in the 11th century beside the cathedral, near Porta del Piano on the line of the old consular road. An outer fortification, now vanished, served as a prison. In the 14th century it belonged to Ugone di Soliaco, who refortified it in 1340; later it passed to the De Sangro family, and local memory keeps above all Tommasa, feudal lady of Larino, who governed for years on behalf of her son Ugolino while he was still a minor. A shield with the family arms survives in vico Brencola, carved on the keystone of a Gothic pointed arch: the archaeologist Franco Valente argued it had been moved there from elsewhere, perhaps from the castle itself, in the years when the Sangro name was being erased. In 1683 the same family turned the fortress into a nobleman's residence, and warfare left those walls for good.
What to see
The building is square in plan, with a tower at the north-east corner. A long flight of steps leads up to a porticoed atrium, which in turn carries a loggia of wide round arches — the point where the whole palace makes sense at once. The staircase continues to the first and second floors. The council chamber is Liberty in style, with a fresco of the civic arms, a wing on a blue field, and on its four sides the faces of men from Molise and Larino from the Risorgimento years.
At atrium level are the civic archaeological museum and the “Bartolomeo Preziosi” municipal library. The museum keeps three Roman mosaic floors from the excavations of Larinum: the Birds, the Lion and the She-wolf. Roman epigraphs and inscriptions line the walls of the first room, where a grand piano stands, given to the town by Professor Preziosi. The second room holds Roman-period finds in display cases.
Our editors' tip
Look at the Piazza Roma front before you go in: it was built in 1888, when the palace already belonged to the town, and was never finished. It is the most honest thing the building says about itself.