The places
31 places, six ways of looking at them
Each section gathers what is best explained together. To see them all on the map, open the map.
Nature
Nature and landscape
Rivers, gorges, gypsum, wetlands: the material the valley is made of.
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
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Nature
The Rio Secco gorges
A narrow gorge between the Morge della Penna and the castle crag, where Mediterranean scrub grows and the peregrine falcon circles.
Roccascalegna and Gessopalena
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Nature
The Costa dei Trabocchi
Colossal wooden spiders suspended over the sea, once fishing machines. D'Annunzio described them; today a cycleway runs past them all.
from Ortona to San Salvo
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Nature
The last orange groves on the coast
Orange gardens grown in the open field since the 15th century, survivors of a little ice age and of Sicilian competition.
Rocca San Giovanni, San Vito Chietino, Vasto
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Nature
The threshold between two worlds
Seashore plants growing thirty kilometres inland, four truffle genotypes out of the seven in Europe: the Sangro valley is an ark.
Sangro Valley
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Nature
The gypsum outcrops
Rocks formed when the Mediterranean dried out, six million years ago. Soft enough to dig a house into.
Aventino Valley
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Nature
Lake Casoli
The Sant'Angelo reservoir on the Aventino, with the Maiella behind it. On its shore opens a cavity lined with gypsum alabaster.
Casoli
DiscoverArchitecture
Architecture
Castles, abbeys and historic centres grown onto the rock.
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
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Architecture
The Ducal Castle of Casoli
A pentagonal tower with a whole village grown around it. D'Annunzio stayed here; in 1943 it became the British headquarters.
Casoli
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Architecture
The historic centre of Casoli
Houses set in rings around the tower, with the streets broken at every ring so that nobody could climb straight to the top.
Casoli
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Architecture
The abbey of San Giovanni in Venere
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.
Fossacesia
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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
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Architecture
Altino and its red gold
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.
Altino
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Architecture
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.
Torricella Peligna
DiscoverArchaeology
Archaeology
What is left of the Carricini, of the Romans and of the people who worked gypsum.
Archaeology
The archaeological park of Iuvanum
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.
Montenerodomo
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Archaeology
The gypsum quarries and kilns
Chisel marks, blasting holes, millstones turned by donkeys, cableways: the industrial archaeology of a trade that ended in a few decades.
Aventino Valley
DiscoverArt
Art and memory
Works left out in the landscape, and people who made the history of these villages.
Art
La Morgia and “Orizzonti”
A crag that legend says Samson carried here on his shoulders. In 1997 Costas Varotsos filled its wound with sheets of glass.
Gessopalena
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Art
“La Biscia” by Nunzio Di Stefano
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.
Altino, Serranella Oasis
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Art
“La collina degli alberi morti”
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.
Altino, Serranella Oasis
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Art
“La Parabola” by Giuliano Giuliani
A travertine slab, with one part left rough, driven into a slope and set to speak directly with the Maiella.
Torricella Peligna
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Art
Arte Natura: a territory as a laboratory
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.
Sangro-Aventino Valley
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Art
The intellectuals of 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.
Gessopalena
DiscoverMuseums
Museums
Small museums that tell one thing only, and tell it well.
Museums
Iuvanum Archaeological Museum
Four sections, from the Neolithic to the imperial age. Among the pieces, the bronze and silver harness of an eques's horse.
Montenerodomo
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Museums
Museum of the History and Transformation of the Landscape
The first landscape museum in Abruzzo: one exhibition building and fourteen waymarked itineraries out in the countryside. The museum is the valley itself.
Montenerodomo and more than 16 municipalities
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Museums
The Gypsum Museum
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.
Gessopalena
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Museums
The Sweet Pepper Museum
Listening posts with the market gardeners' proverbs, videos on the stages of cultivation, touch screens with the old recipes. A museum about a vegetable.
Altino
DiscoverFood
Food and traditions
The pepper, the truffle, the oil, and the feasts that go with them.
Food
The Altino Sweet Pepper
Small, horn-shaped, deep red, pointing upwards: “a cocce capammonte”. It is air-dried, toasted and crushed in a mortar called a “penele”.
Altino
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Food
The truffle of the Sangro Valley
Four genotypes out of the seven in Europe survived here through the last ice age. A true Noah's Ark of the white truffle.
Quadri, Borrello, Rosello, Pizzoferrato
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Food
The salsicciotto frentano
Where the air is cold and dry, above nine hundred metres, exposure to the air alone is enough to keep it.
Upper and middle Sangro valley
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Food
The Holy Wednesday Passion Play
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.
Gessopalena
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Food
The Sweet Pepper Festival
In the last week of August the historic centre of Altino becomes an open-air kitchen, with a Palio Culinario of its own.
Altino
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