Roccacasale

Roccacasale sits, overlooking the Peligna valley and the town of Sulmona below. The settlement coalesced as a defensive borgo on the slopes directly under a rocca built before the year 1000 to guard the entrance to the Sangro valley and the Cinquemiglia plain against Saracen and Byzantine raids. In 1318 part of the territory passed to Giacomo Cantelmo.

The Cantelmo family held the castle through the Renaissance, then in the late sixteenth century it passed to the barons whose name it still carries. In 1803, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, the French army destroyed it. The terraced houses of the borgo and the hilltop ruin above them still trace that original relationship, defended village below, stronghold above, unchanged in plan since the medieval period.

The commune lies inside the Maiella National Park, its territory reaching from the valley floor up the ridge toward hermitage sites once occupied by a hermit pope. What remains is a settlement whose whole layout, from the walled church to the terraces to the shattered walls on the hill, still reads as a single defensive idea built to watch two valleys at once.