Guardialfiera

Guardialfiera sits on a 285-meter ridge above the Biferno valley. The town has been inhabited since at least the eleventh century, with a Roman tower visible on the western edge until the tenth. Roger II conquered it in 1130; the Soliaco and Marzano families held it through the fourteenth century; a 1688 earthquake levelled it and forced the rebuild whose stone streets still climb the ridge today.

Pope Alexander II established the Diocese of Guardialfiera in 1061; it was suppressed in 1818 and survives as a titular see. The river below was dammed in 1976, and the valley the town once overlooked became the lake it now overlooks, the largest in Molise. The hills that climb away from that water are the same ones that produce the oil good enough for the Città dell'Olio mark, and the same ones a native writer used as the settings for his fiction. A ridge town, a drowned valley, and a diocese reduced to a title: Guardialfiera is a place that has been remade more than once and kept climbing back up its own hill each time.