Prof. Battista takes us into the heart of the newly established Sirente-Velino Regional Park to show the stages of a research in progress in Secinaro for the U.N.O. International Mountain Year. The research focussed on ten true-life mountain stories representing the cultural and environmental heritage of the place, accompanied by collections of old images kept by the local families. The results were shown on 10, 11 and 12 August, and the stories were narrated by people of the place.
He’s waiting for me in Piazza degli Eroi, perhaps the last one and unaware of it, Luigino Barbati, with his two brothers and a tourist enterprise he set up some years ago, obstinate to stay on the “frontier, – he says – among the medicinal herbs and plants “which he uses to season the dishes to the groups of tourists stopping in Secinaro, in the heart of the Sirente mountains, a borderline post amid last forest that has survived to our days, a forest that was in the tales of medieval merchants on the “Road of the Abruzzi”; and the sun that here the merchants finally saw, after two weeks of travelling the Apennines under the thick vegetation; and the slopes of the Subequana valley coming down to the Aterno river, where farmers, to mark field borders, used stones from Roman times, elegantly carved by the from the Peligni Superequani, and found while tilling the fields in agricultural works.
Thousands and thousands of wood hectares rise like theater curtains behind Secinaro, until they reach the dolomite-like pinnacles of the Sirente range: a landscape that “fades into infinity”, as Felice Santarelli wrote in 1922 and that today “without a coordination of the small municipalities to improve the services, to develop projects for a “return” tourism, is doomed to a slow, implacable desertification” says Giuseppe Colantoni, the mayor of Secinaro. In a few weeks on the Website pf the comune the program of events for the Secinarese abroad and their associations will be launched, in order to gather them, next August, according to a project planned by the town administration.
Three days planned within the “International Year of the Mountains – 2002” with a conference on “testimonials and landscape”, a documentary bilingual exhibition under the title “Secinaro, ten tales for the Year of the Mountains “, narrative performances in the historical town centre, trekking in the ancestral sites of the Sirente and finally meetings with entrepreneurs belonging to the third generation of emigrants, a possible magic wand to understand whether it will ever be possible to break the spell in the lines of poet Santarelli.
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