Borgo medievale di Alfedena

Alfedena's historic centre reads like a quarry turned inside out: lanes paved with local stone, doorposts and outdoor stairs cut from the same rock, gates in the medieval fabric, and the grey tower of the Caracciolo castle rising over everything. This is a workers' borgo, shaped by generations of stone masons who carried their trade as far as Rome.

Why it matters

The borgo grew attached to the medieval castle of the Caracciolo princes of Cellammare, and the two remain structurally inseparable: lanes coil up the slope towards the walls, and the castle's octagonal tower frames every view of the rooftops. What distinguishes Alfedena from other restored villages of the national park is the visibility of its craft history. The park authority's own village sheet leads with the paved lanes, the door jambs and the external staircases cut by local hands, and with the profession those hands fed: the selciatori, the stone pavers of Alfedena who worked the roads of Rome, including the sampietrini of St Peter's Square. At 914 metres in the high Sangro valley, this is a place that explains itself through its material.

What to notice

The old quarter’s gates are among the defining features of the medieval fabric. Its masonry includes jambs, thresholds and open-air staircases are all cut from the local stone, and the paving underfoot is the same selce the masons laid. The urban gate decorated with the aufidenate coat of arms opens towards the oldest nucleus, and near the piazza you can compare the village fountain, the work of local master stonecutters, with the Monumento al Selciatore that the Villa Comunale dedicates to the paving trade, its figure by the sculptor Sandro Pagliuchi. The villa itself is a curiosity: so rich in plant species that the University of Naples designated it a botanical garden at the end of the nineteenth century. The civic tower, a late nineteenth-century adaptation of a medieval tower, carries the public clock.

Context and history

The village descends from the medieval settlement that clustered under the castle after the long dusk of Samnite Aufidena, whose walls and necropolis occupy the hill immediately above. Alfedena passed through the County of Sangro and the lordships of the De Sangro family before the Caracciolo, marquises of Alfedena until the end of the eighteenth century, gave the castle the name it still bears. The twentieth century cut deep: between 1940 and 1943 the village was used for the civil internment of foreign Jewish refugees, and on 5 October 1943 Allied bombardment badly damaged the castle, the mother church and the civic tower, while the population was displaced to Avezzano. The reconstruction that followed left the medieval street pattern intact but renewed much of the fabric, which is why the stonework and the gates carry the visit today.