Sulmona Culture

Sulmona's culture is unusually literal: it is built on one poet, one sweet and one ritual, and all three are taken seriously.

Ovid

The town has not stopped claiming him in two thousand years. His statue stands in Piazza XX Settembre, his initials are on the municipal arms, the main street carries his name, and every spring the town runs the Certamen Ovidianum, a Latin translation competition that brings secondary-school students from across Europe to sit an exam here.

Confetti

The sugared almond is a craft here rather than a product. Almonds are coated by slow rotation in copper basins, a process of hours, and the finished sweets are wired with tulle into flowers, bouquets and sheaves for weddings, christenings and graduations. The Pelino family have been at it since 1783 and keep a museum of the machinery. Half the shop windows on the corso are given over to the results, arranged as bouquets.

The confraternities

The lay brotherhoods that ran charity, burial and processions in the medieval town still exist and still process, in coloured robes, through Holy Week. They are the organisers of the town's best-known ritual rather than a survival kept going for visitors.

Goldsmiths

Sulmona had a goldsmiths' guild of real standing from the fourteenth century, and its work is the core of the civic museum collection.

Peligno, not just Abruzzese

People here identify with the Valle Peligna specifically, speak a dialect distinct from the coast's, and are wry about the mountains that have kept the valley to itself. The valley grows its own red garlic, a landrace found nowhere else, and is quietly certain that it is the best in Italy.