Scontrone

The borgo sits at the southern end of the Alto Sangro, on the lip of the gorge the Sangro river cuts between Lake Barrea and the Castel di Sangro plain. It has 533 residents. Two things account for its being known beyond that stretch of the gorge. Since 1988 the village has painted its stone façades with murals, twenty-four of them by Italian and international artists, mostly on the theme of emigration, restored in 2017. And in 1991 a paleontological site of international importance turned up just outside the village: Miocene fauna around 10 million years old, including the strongly endemic Hoplitomeryx, a small five-horned deer that lived on a Mediterranean archipelago. Those fossils now sit in a documentation center named for the animal.

The village also houses the Museo della Montagna and an International Museum of Women in Art, so a place of 533 people has accumulated four separate museums and collections. The Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise begins on the far bank of the same river, meaning the village looks across the gorge at the edge of the park rather than sitting inside it.

What the murals and the fossil bed have in common is a way of turning what could have been marginal, a depopulating mountain village, a chance find in a streambed, into the two things people now travel here to see.