Ecomuseo Sangro-Aventino
One land. Its stories. Its memory.
Between the sea and the Maiella, along the rivers Sangro and Aventino. A museum without walls, where the works on show are the landscapes.
Lake Casoli, on the Aventino
Discover the Ecomuseum
A museum that has no walls
The term was coined by Hugues de Varine in 1971. But the real author of the idea was the museologist Georges Henri Rivière, who described the ecomuseum as “the museum of the time and the space of a given territory, an institution whose task is to study, preserve and give value to the collective memory of a community and of the land that houses it”.
Here the works on show are not only objects of everyday life: they are the landscapes, the architecture, the oral record of tradition. A network of places spread between the sea and the mountains, along two rivers that for centuries decided where people built, where they milled, where they passed.
Explore the area
31 places, six ways of looking at them
Nature, architecture, archaeology, art, museums, food. Choose a category, or open the map and walk through it with your eyes.
Architecture
The rock-hewn village of Gessopalena
Houses, churches, stables and oil mills cut straight into a mountain of gypsum. The only one of its kind in Italy. Razed to the ground on 4 December 1943.
Gessopalena
Discover
Architecture
Roccascalegna castle
Four towers on a sandstone spur, rebuilt each time weapons changed. In one of them tradition places a hand of blood.
Roccascalegna
Discover
Nature
The Serranella Oasis
A dam built for industry turned within a few years into a marsh, then an oasis, then a reserve: three hundred hectares where the Sangro and the Aventino meet.
Sant'Eusanio del Sangro, Altino and Casoli
DiscoverStories from the area
What the places alone do not tell you
Long reads that cross several places: geology that becomes a trade, the trade that becomes landscape, the landscape that becomes art.
The gypsum culture
A mountain that lets itself be dug
At Gessopalena they did not build a village on the rock: they built it inside. Then, in two days of December 1943, almost nothing was left.
8 minutes' read
Read the story
Biodiversity
Noah's Ark
Seashore plants growing thirty kilometres inland, firs more southern than their neighbours, four truffle genotypes out of the seven in Europe. The Sangro valley is a refuge.
6 minutes' read
Read the story
Arte Natura
A territory as a laboratory
In 1994 an artist from Roccascalegna persuaded colleagues from half of Europe to come and live in this valley and leave a work behind. Not in a gallery: in the landscape.
7 minutes' read
Read the storyChoose your route
Six themed itineraries
Each route lines up the places that explain one another. The distances are approximate, measured from one stop to the next.
From the lake to the sea
The ways of water
You follow the Aventino to where it meets the Sangro, then the Sangro to where it meets the sea. In between: a lake, a marsh turned reserve, a gorge cut into sandstone.
- 60 km
- A full day
- Easy
- 6 stops
The gypsum culture
The soft stone
A rock you can scratch with a fingernail, and which for centuries was house, street, church, oil mill, economy. Then in thirty years it was all over.
- 17 km
- Half a day
- Moderate
- 5 stops
Castles and historic centres
Stone and defence
Four villages grown onto four different rocks — sandstone, limestone, gypsum — and each time a different urban shape.
- 32 km
- A full day
- Moderate
- 5 stops
A living heritage
The natural setting around us is majestic.
The resources for a greater development of our region are before our eyes every day, but it is precisely because we do not know them that we undervalue them, or ignore them altogether.
This Ecomuseum was not born in a council department. It was born in a secondary school, between 2018 and 2019, when a group of students was sent out to look at their own land with the eyes of those who will have to decide its future.
Coming events
When it is worth coming
Every year, in the last week of August
Sweet Pepper Festival, Altino
The historic centre turns into an open-air kitchen. Among the dishes of the Palio Culinario: Spaghetto in festa with sweet pepper cream, and cuttlefish dressed with flavoured oil.
Historic centre of Altino
Every two years, on the Wednesday of Holy Week
Holy Wednesday Passion Play
More than 150 performers in period costume, with musicians, choirs and dancers. The scenes of the crucifixion are staged among the ruins of the village carved into the gypsum, lit by torches, with the Maiella facing them.
Gessopalena, rock-hewn village
Every summer
Truffle fair
Quadri has become one of the main centres for the prized white truffle of the Sangro Valley, which several family firms have built up over the past fifteen years.
Quadri
Take part in the Ecomuseum
An ecomuseum takes two to stand up
An old photograph in a drawer, a trade nobody has put on record, a path that should be signposted: if you have something to add, this place is yours as well.