Pescasseroli historical timeline

Pescasseroli spent most of its history as a grazing village and became something else in 1922.

Transhumance

For centuries the economy was sheep. Flocks summered on these mountains and walked south to the plains of Puglia every autumn along the tratturi, the wide grass drove roads; the one that starts here ran 211 kilometres to Candela. The system was taxed and regulated from Foggia and lasted, in decline, into the twentieth century.

The Sangro barons

The village belonged to feudal families through the medieval and early modern periods, and the ruined castle above the centre is theirs. It was poor, remote and reachable only over passes.

Croce

Benedetto Croce was born here on 25 February 1866 into a landowning family. He lost his parents and sister in the Casamicciola earthquake of 1883 and was himself pulled out of the rubble; he went on to become the dominant figure in Italian intellectual life and a public opponent of Fascism.

The park

A national park here was proposed before the First World War and established in 1922, largely through the persistence of a small group of naturalists and with Croce among its supporters. It is the oldest Italian national park still in existence.

Two setbacks

The park nearly did not survive. Its governing body was dissolved in 1933 and management passed to the state forestry administration, a period in which protection weakened badly. Worse followed in 1943 and 1944, when the front came up the Sangro valley: the villages were occupied and evacuated, and wartime hunting cut the bear and chamois populations to a handful.

The tourist village

From the 1960s Pescasseroli built hotels and a ski lift and became a resort for Rome and Naples, which is where its present shape and most of its buildings come from.