How Was Agnone Built

Agnone is one street, built along a ridge, with everything hung off it.

The spine

The town follows the crest for over a kilometre, with the corso running its length and short lanes dropping steeply away on both sides. There is no square of any size, because there is no flat ground for one.

Stone

It is built of the local grey limestone, dressed for portals and windows and rough for walls, with heavy roofs and small openings against the mountain winter.

The churches

For a town of this size the number is extraordinary: San Marco with its Romanesque portal, Sant'Emidio, San Francesco, Santa Maria di Costantinopoli and others, most of them medieval and several founded by the merchant quarters.

The Venetian quarter

The Borgo Veneziano still carries the lion of Saint Mark carved above a doorway, which in a mountain town in Molise takes some explaining and is entirely genuine.

The foundry

The Marinelli works is a plain low industrial building on the edge of the town, and the plainness is the point: it is a workshop rather than a monument, and the bells stacked outside it are stock.

Palaces on the corso

The merchant families left tall stone houses along the main street with carved portals and iron balconies, plainer than a lowland palazzo and built to keep heat in rather than to impress a square.

The viaduct

The Sente viaduct, carrying the road out towards Abruzzo across a gorge, was among the highest in Europe when it opened, and has been closed and reopened over structural concerns.