Calascio

Calascio sits at 1,200 meters in the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park, the lower stone village where the shepherds who stayed after the transhumance ended made their houses. The fortress above it began around the year 1000 as a watchtower controlling the routes that ran 250 kilometers down from L'Aquila to the Tavoliere delle Puglie, and it was this wool wealth that built the village below. Wool from these flocks was prized enough that the Medici came north to buy it. The upper village beside the castle emptied when the transhumance ended in the 1850s and has been under slow restoration since, stonemasons working with original materials under the Borgo Autentici designation, while the lower village kept its 125 residents and its parish church. From the castle the view runs across Campo Imperatore, the high plateau immediately to the north, toward the Gran Sasso peaks.

The two settlements read as before and after: the upper one preserved in its abandonment, the lower one still lived in because it held the people the transhumance left behind.