Agnone Culture

Agnone's culture is made of two things that are unusual anywhere: a surviving craft economy and a fire ritual.

The foundry

Bells here are still cast the medieval way, in a mould built up from clay, goat hair and horse manure around a wooden template, decorated with wax reliefs, buried in a pit and filled with bronze in a single pour. The family has done it for something like thirty generations. You can watch, and the workshop smells of it.

The 'Ndocciata

On 24 December, and again in early December, fan-shaped torches of fir and broom — some carrying more than twenty separate flames — are built by the town's districts and carried down the main street by hundreds of people. It is genuinely old, tied to the winter solstice as much as to Christmas, and it is not a reconstruction.

Copper

The surviving coppersmiths still hammer pans, stills and church fittings to order, and the sound of it is part of the street.

Emptying

Everyone here has family abroad, and August is when Agnone sounds like a town of ten thousand again. The rest of the year it does not.

Dialect and distance

The speech here is closer to the mountain dialects of Abruzzo than to those of the Molise lowlands, which matches how the town has always traded: north and outwards, rather than down to the coast.

Food

Caciocavallo from the mountain pastures, pecorino, sausage, and ostie ripiene, wafers filled with walnuts and honey, which are made here and almost nowhere else.