Roseto Valfortore

The first time this place is named, it is in order to free someone. The name Rosito appears in 752, in the document by which the Lombard duke Liutprand declares the slave Cunda free together with her son Liupergo. The village stands at nearly seven hundred metres in the Daunian Mountains, below Monte Cornacchia, and for centuries it lived on water and stone: the oldest mill dates from 1338, and the sandstone from the local quarries was exported, so much so that the fifteenth-century front of the cathedral of Ariano Irpino is made entirely of Roseto stone.

In 1860 Garibaldi's troops put the village to fire and sword and shot six Bourbon soldiers. Then people began to leave: from 1882 towards the United States, and in 1912 the Roseto emigrants in Pennsylvania founded a new town and called it Roseto, which is still an American municipality; after the war it was Canada's turn. Before the conflict more than five thousand people lived here, now fewer than a thousand. The stone village, left whole, is among the most beautiful in Italy.