Roccamorice

Roccamorice sits at 520 meters on the western flank of the Majella massif, inside the boundaries of the national park. The village was founded around the year 1000 and stayed small, its fortunes shaped less by the settlement itself than by the limestone around it, where the rock has been hollowed into retreats since before the 11th century. A hermit spent two years in one of them before his election as Pope, and the larger of the two hermitages, cut partly into a cliff face, was another of his retreats during the same years on the Majella.

The trails to both hermitages start in the village, so the town functions as the low point from which the mountain is entered rather than a destination in itself. That relation is repeated every August 25, when a statue is carried down from the rock to the parish church and, presumably, back again: the village receives what the mountain holds. The abdication that followed, an event Dante placed in his Inferno, is the one moment when a hermit's retreat from the world became a subject of it.