Overview
Spending one's vacation in Rocca di Mezzo is a pleasure for body, mind and soul. Medieval in character, it is surrounded by cool shady pine forests and wide meadows and is the ideal resort center. Its unique landscape allows many routes for hiking and mountaineering and the nearby slopes of Magnola and Campo Felice offer interesting routes for skiers in winter. Rocca di Mezzo nourishes your body, but not only that. Among its narrow streets there are a variety of artistic treasures to be discovered. The parish church of St. Mary of the Snows is one of them: medieval in style, it was built over the area of the ancient castle, denoted by the presence of the bell tower where surely the watchtower stood. After the 1915 earthquake, restoration gave it a neo-Romanesque exterior and neo-Classical and neo-Renaissance interior.
Then do not miss the Church of St. Michael the Archangel, which, built in the 17th century, was expanded in the 19th century in a mixed neoclassical and neo-Gothic style when it became a public church from a private chapel.
Important for religious art is the "Cardinal Agnifili" Museum of Sacred Art, which houses liturgical furnishings, reliquaries, wooden statues from the 15th century, vestments of Cardinal Agnifili, and holds an important collection of antiphonaries made of vellum.
In Rovere, if you sharpen your eyesight, you will find the Church of San Pietro de Vignoli. It is the oldest and, merging with the urban fabric of houses, has no facade and the entrance is given on the side by a 17th-century Baroque portal.
In the hamlet of Terranera, on the other hand, you will find the Church of San Lorenzo, which is very old, with an 18th-century appearance, a very simple facade with a sloping roof, an entrance at a two-arched loggia on the right flank and with an architraved portal, topped by the bell tower.
We point out two perfect occasions to come to Rocca di Mezzo: the Narcissus Festival, in spring, which celebrates the arrival of the beautiful season through the symbolic flower of the place, which surrounds the meadows and hills of the village and decorates the floats of the colorful and fragrant festival, and the Furrow Race, in September, a tradition that originated as a vow to the Madonna of the Snow to rid the village of the plague.
Take advantage of the opportunity to try lentils, classic pecorino cheese or cheese flavored with chili, truffle, walnut or saffron, mustards and rosehip jams.
What else to see:
- the Church of Our Lady of Grace
- the Church of Santa Maria Assunta