Castle of Rocca Calascio

The rocca stands at around 1,460 metres on a ridge of the Gran Sasso, the highest fortress in the Apennines. It was built of stone for military purposes alone, to hold troops rather than house a lord, and it overlooked the Plain of Navelli from one of the highest points of the old Barony of Carapelle. Set between Campo Imperatore to the north and the Tirino valley to the south-east, it counted among the principal fortifications of Abruzzo: an observation post in contact with neighbouring towers and castles as far as the Adriatic, watching the tracks by which flocks moved to and from the Campo Imperatore pastures.

Its beginnings are told two ways. One account has a single watchtower going up in the 10th century; another traces the foundation to Roger II of Hauteville, who probably promoted the work after the Norman conquest of 1140. The first documentary record dates only from 1239, and the fortress may stand on the remains of an earlier Roman work.

Lordship passed through a long line of families — Pagliara, Colonna, Celano, Caldora, Accrocciamuro, Piccolomini Todeschini, Del Pezzo, Cattaneo, Medici and Bourbon. In 1463 Ferdinand I of Naples granted the castle to Antonio Todeschini of the Piccolomini, credited with the rubble-stone curtain wall and its four cylindrical towers with Ghibelline merlons; other accounts date that walled court and its corner towers, ringing the older central keep, to the 13th century. The lower half of the masonry is laid in markedly larger stones than the upper, thought to have been meant to make the base impenetrable, and the way in was a door on the eastern side some five metres above the ground, reached by a wooden ramp that could be drawn up. The defences were never tested in battle.

What war never did, the ground did. The L'Aquila earthquake of November 1461, estimated at magnitude 7 to 8, badly damaged the fortress; the town of Calascio below it was rebuilt, and the fortress was not. A second violent earthquake in 1703 damaged the castle again and destroyed almost the whole village beneath it, and with its strategic purpose gone the site was left to decay until, by 1957, the rocca stood entirely uninhabited.

The cinema brought it back. Rocca Calascio served as the hermit's refuge in Ladyhawke in 1985, when it was still unrestored, and scenes for The Name of the Rose and The American were shot here. Restoration and consolidation work followed between 1986 and 1989, some houses in the medieval village were recovered, and in 2019 National Geographic placed the castle among the fifteen most beautiful in the world.