Pretoro

The Maiella is the limestone massif that dominates Chieti province, and Pretoro holds its eastern flank, the houses tiered in narrow stone rows up the hillside rather than spread along it. The village sits inside the Maiella National Park itself, so the wolf enclosure above town and the trails west toward the Blockhaus and Maielletta refuge are not add-ons to the place but part of its ground. Beech forest covers the slopes above the houses, and that forest is the reason both the timber trade and the wolves ended up here: the trees fed generations of lathe and spindle work on the street below, and the same cover, higher up, gave the wildlife area a place to keep rescued animals in something like their own terrain.

The patronal festival draws the two threads together, since its wolf story is acted out in the same streets where the workshops still stand. What the village amounts to is a single hillside where a forest economy and a forest predator have been worked into daily and annual life rather than kept apart.