Skip to content

Ecomuseo Sangro · Aventino

Ecomuseum Explore Routes Stories Events

IT EN FR DE

Explore the map

Ecomuseum
Explore
Routes
Stories
Events
Food
Take part

Explore the map

Italiano English Français Deutsch

Explore the area

31 places

Nature

The Serranella Oasis

Sant'Eusanio del Sangro, Altino and Casoli

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.

Nature

The Rio Secco gorges

Roccascalegna and Gessopalena

A narrow gorge between the Morge della Penna and the castle crag, where Mediterranean scrub grows and the peregrine falcon circles.

Nature

The Costa dei Trabocchi

from Ortona to San Salvo

Colossal wooden spiders suspended over the sea, once fishing machines. D'Annunzio described them; today a cycleway runs past them all.

Nature

The last orange groves on the coast

Rocca San Giovanni, San Vito Chietino, Vasto

Orange gardens grown in the open field since the 15th century, survivors of a little ice age and of Sicilian competition.

Nature

The threshold between two worlds

Sangro Valley

Seashore plants growing thirty kilometres inland, four truffle genotypes out of the seven in Europe: the Sangro valley is an ark.

Nature

The gypsum outcrops

Aventino Valley

Rocks formed when the Mediterranean dried out, six million years ago. Soft enough to dig a house into.

Architecture

Roccascalegna castle

Roccascalegna

Four towers on a sandstone spur, rebuilt each time weapons changed. In one of them tradition places a hand of blood.

Architecture

The Ducal Castle of Casoli

Casoli

A pentagonal tower with a whole village grown around it. D'Annunzio stayed here; in 1943 it became the British headquarters.

Architecture

The historic centre of Casoli

Casoli

Houses set in rings around the tower, with the streets broken at every ring so that nobody could climb straight to the top.

Architecture

The abbey of San Giovanni in Venere

Fossacesia

Built where a temple of Venus once stood, it looks out to sea from 107 metres. At the summer solstice the sun comes in through the doorway and lights the crypt.

Architecture

The rock-hewn village of Gessopalena

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.

Architecture

Altino and its red gold

Altino

A village on a spur that looks over two valleys, and a necklace of red peppers hung out to dry: “a cocce capammonte”, head up.

Architecture

Torricella Peligna

Torricella Peligna

Nine hundred metres up, the Carricini tribe, a man mummified in the 17th century and the birthplace of the man who founded the Brigata Majella.

Nature

Lake Casoli

Casoli

The Sant'Angelo reservoir on the Aventino, with the Maiella behind it. On its shore opens a cavity lined with gypsum alabaster.

Archaeology

The archaeological park of Iuvanum

Montenerodomo

At 1,165 metres, on a plateau that in winter is all wind: an Italic sanctuary, a theatre, a Roman forum and then a Cistercian monastery.

Archaeology

The gypsum quarries and kilns

Aventino Valley

Chisel marks, blasting holes, millstones turned by donkeys, cableways: the industrial archaeology of a trade that ended in a few decades.

Art

La Morgia and “Orizzonti”

Gessopalena

A crag that legend says Samson carried here on his shoulders. In 1997 Costas Varotsos filled its wound with sheets of glass.

Art

“La Biscia” by Nunzio Di Stefano

Altino, Serranella Oasis

Carrara marble on a pool. In profile it is a water snake, head on a sea monster, from a distance a pair of suspended lips.

Art

“La collina degli alberi morti”

Altino, Serranella Oasis

Great pedunculate oaks found buried under the gravel during the digging of the Oasis, brought back to the surface and rebuilt into a hill by Sebastiano De Laurentiis.

Art

“La Parabola” by Giuliano Giuliani

Torricella Peligna

A travertine slab, with one part left rough, driven into a slope and set to speak directly with the Maiella.

Art

Arte Natura: a territory as a laboratory

Sangro-Aventino Valley

Since 1994 Italian and foreign artists have been invited to live in the valley and leave a work behind. Not in a gallery: in the landscape.

Art

The intellectuals of Gessopalena

Gessopalena

A folklorist, two poets, a composer, a hygienist: a village of a few thousand souls that in the 19th century sent its sons to Naples.

Museums

Iuvanum Archaeological Museum

Montenerodomo

Four sections, from the Neolithic to the imperial age. Among the pieces, the bronze and silver harness of an eques's horse.

Museums

Museum of the History and Transformation of the Landscape

Montenerodomo and more than 16 municipalities

The first landscape museum in Abruzzo: one exhibition building and fourteen waymarked itineraries out in the countryside. The museum is the valley itself.

Museums

The Gypsum Museum

Gessopalena

It has no rooms: they are the dug-out houses of the rock-hewn village. The panels are only there to explain what you are looking at.

Museums

The Sweet Pepper Museum

Altino

Listening posts with the market gardeners' proverbs, videos on the stages of cultivation, touch screens with the old recipes. A museum about a vegetable.

Food

The Altino Sweet Pepper

Altino

Small, horn-shaped, deep red, pointing upwards: “a cocce capammonte”. It is air-dried, toasted and crushed in a mortar called a “penele”.

Food

The truffle of the Sangro Valley

Quadri, Borrello, Rosello, Pizzoferrato

Four genotypes out of the seven in Europe survived here through the last ice age. A true Noah's Ark of the white truffle.

Food

The salsicciotto frentano

Upper and middle Sangro valley

Where the air is cold and dry, above nine hundred metres, exposure to the air alone is enough to keep it.

Food

The Holy Wednesday Passion Play

Gessopalena

For more than fifty years the Passion has been staged among the ruins of the rock-hewn village, lit by torches, with the Maiella facing it.

Food

The Sweet Pepper Festival

Altino

In the last week of August the historic centre of Altino becomes an open-air kitchen, with a Palio Culinario of its own.

No places in this selection.