Overview
If you love rivers, nature, hiking and superb food, choose for your vacation Castellafiume, a small village in the province of L'Aquila on the banks of the Liri, the largest waterway in Marsica.
For this location it was named "Castrum fluminis", castle on the river, at the confluence with the Rio Sonno (or Riosondoli) torrent.
There is nothing but a distant memory (a handful of ruins of the Orsini-Colonna castle) of the 11th and 12th centuries (the period in which the village had to rise, later becoming a feud of the Orsini and Colonna families), considering that the 1915 earthquake devastated the community.
But the centre is pretty, with a plot of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, and some interesting churches, such as the one dedicated to San Nicola, the symbol of the village: a "resilient" religious monument, built in the medieval age by the Benedictine monks of Montecassino, and several times modified and restructured, as the various stylistic and architectural elements from which it is made up testify.
In the area, reach the Cave of the Madonna della Ravara, in the district of Ponte, where a beautiful statue dedicated to the Virgin Mary was placed in 2013. In Pagliara, you will find the churches of San Salvatore, with an elegant Renaissance portal and a 19-pipe organ built with admirable technical perfection in 1873 by the organ builder Tommaso Vayola, and Madonna della Neve, as well as the remains of the ancient castle.
In the locality of Pascolano (or Pascusano), you can also admire the remains of an ancient tower, in memory of the castle where small dwellings were built around it by the shepherds and farmers of the surrounding area.
You can also arrange, if you have time on your hands, a series of guided hikes and sport climbing in the area, which is full of mountain crags.
But only if you are trained.
And if you are nearby in August, we recommend attending the festival of pasta and beans and arrosticini, undisputed ambassadors of the region, once of humble origins. Tradition says that they were created by two shepherds from Voltigno (the border of three out of Abruzzo's four provinces), who, in order not to waste the meat of an old sheep, chopped it into pieces, threading it through wooden skewers and roasting it over a fire.
And so, from less noble meat parts, a dish of kings was born, included by the relevant ministry in the list of traditional Italian food products.
What else to see:
- The church of San Rocco
- The Cona Chapel, on the pass between Mount Girifalco and the neighboring Mount Arunzo
- The Roman Aqueduct of Arunzo
- The Cave of San Lorenzo, on Mount Girifalco
- The Valleverde Lake