How Was Pescasseroli Built

Pescasseroli is two villages on the same site, and the join is obvious.

The old centre

The original settlement is a tight knot of stone houses on the slope below a ruined castle, built of the local grey limestone with small windows and steep roofs against snow. The lanes are narrow and stepped and the houses share walls, which is how mountain villages here kept warm.

The church

Santi Pietro e Paolo is Romanesque in origin, much rebuilt, with a plain stone front and a wooden Madonna from the twelfth century inside. It sits at the edge of the old centre rather than at its heart.

The castle

What remains above the village is fragmentary: a tower base and some wall. It was a feudal seat rather than a fortress of consequence, and its stone was largely reused in the houses below.

The resort

From the 1960s the village expanded onto the flat valley floor with hotels, apartment blocks and a road system built for cars. Some of it is well done and much of it is not, and it roughly tripled the built footprint.

Wood and stone

Traditional building here used stone for walls and beech and fir for everything else, both taken from a few kilometres away. Modern construction uses neither, which is why the new parts of the village could be anywhere.

Snow shapes everything

Roof pitches, external steps, ground floors used as stores and covered entrances all exist because this valley is under snow for weeks at a time.