The Shaping of a Mountain Bourgeoisie and its Highly-Cultured Traditions

The activities connected with the cattle continued to be a solid pillar for the economy of mountain villages, until the XVIIIth Century. In order to satisfy the primary needs this asset was increased through the products coming from the farming acitivities, at times made at very high altitudes (beyond 1400 meters on the Plateaux).

On this basis, also in small centers, a middle-class made of bourgeois and some times small nobility shaped. They aimed to acquire a good culture in the education centres - Naples, but also Montecassino, Bologna or Rome – and to practice the liberal professions.

Because of this class remained in its original countries, it turned up the standard of life at times providing with a rich library its sumptuous houses, or giving works of art the local churches. The local purchasers strongly supported the blooming of an artistic handicraft that, thanks to this reason and to the exchanges with the other centres of Italian art (Rome, Naples and Milan) reached high levels.

The phenomenon can be seen in several centers, among which Tocco da Casauria, Bolognano, San Valentino, Caramanico, Manoppello, Guardiagrele and in particular Pescocostanzo. Not only homeland for architects, sculptors and marble-cutters but also landingplace, in the beginnings of XVIIth Century, of great Italian artists like Tanzio da Varallo and Cosimo Fanzago, the genius of Baroque in the Southern Italy.

A century later, the middle-class of this city was able to arrange and manage by itself the redemption from the feudal rule, carried out in 1774.

The above mentioned building heritage – dating back between the XVIIth and XIXth Centuries, jointly with big medioeval and renaissance churches, rocks and towers – represent the most remarkable evidence of a real "Mountain Middle-Class" that featured these places from the modern age to contemporary one. The last stage of this historical cycle marks, from a cultural point of view, the apex of this civilization.

The disorders caused by the uprisings of 1799 and the Napoleonic decade, also the villages life of Abruzzi mountains sustained an acceleration. The main communication routes were improved: under Murat the "Route of Abruzzi" was restored and since that moment it was called "Napoleonic". In 1842 it was carried out, in the Aventino Valley, the modern plan that connects Palena to Lama dei Peligni. The whole Abruzzi bourgeoisie was involved into the flowering neapolitan world, from which many of its representatives opened a passage towards other Italian and European places (England, France, Germany and Russia). Several jurists, philosophers, statemen, scientists and historians that lived between ‘700 and the years of Italian Unification, not only they were born in the Maiella villages but they also had their first education and kept in touch with them for ever.

Among the most famous it has to be mentioned: Giuseppe De Thomasis (1767-1830) from Montenerodomo, State ownership Officer constitutionalist; Ottavio Colecchi (1773-1847) from Pescocostanzo, philosopher and mathematician, first promoter in Italy of Kant’s thoughts, Academician in San Pietroburgo, founder of Neapolitan Hegelism; Luigi Chiaverini (1777-1834) from Palena but he studied in Pescocostanzo, biologist and psychologist; Benedetto Vulpes (1783-1855) from Pescocostanzo, pathologist and clinician. Salvatore Tommasi (1813-1888), born in Roccaraso, clinician and philosopher, patriot; Leopoldo Dorrucci (1815-1888) and Panfilo Serafini (1817-1864) both from Sulmona, humanists and patriots; Annibale De Gasparis (1819-1892), born in Bugnara, astronomer and mathematician; Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883) and his brother Silvio (1822-1893) both from Bomba, the first philosopher while the other one statesman, both were patriots; Giuseppe De Blasiis (1832-1914) from Sulmona, historian and patriot. Domenico Stromei (1810-1883), l’originalissimo cobber-poet from Tocco da Casauria.

From the XVIIIth Century developed in these zones a local tradition of historical and natural researches. The great historical Chorography of Abruzzi by Anton Ludovico Antinori (1704-1778) was unplished, but he can boast several important collaborations. The works of Giuseppe Liberatore from Castel di Sangro, about the nature and climate on “Piano delle Cinquemiglia” (1789), of Vincenzo Giuliani about the Plateaux territory (1793, unplished until 1993); Ignazio Di Pietro about Sulmona (1804). It deserves to be mentioned also some foreign researchers: Richard Keppel Craven in 1837 and Edward Lear in 1846). They studied the Maiella and its villages. Michele Torcia with a survey on “Peligni’s” country (1792). Michele Tenore, neapolitan botanist with Teatine origins: explored between 1807-1834 and described the flora of Maiella; the great geographers of Bourbon Reign, from Giuseppe Maria Galanti (geographic and political description of Sicily, 1794) to Lorenzo Giustiniani (Geographic Dictionary of Naples Reign, publ. from 1797 to 1805); Filippo Cirelli (Il Regno delle Due Sicilie, 1853); Giovanni Antonio Rizzi Zannoni (Atlas of Naples Reign, 1804-1808) offers a first cartographical image of Maiella. In 1837 Pasquale de Virgiliis from Chieti wrote a survey about Majella. It deals with a description, between the reality and fiction, of a travel among villages, caves, shepherds, charcoal burners and anchorets on North-East slope of Majella. The poet Pietro Paolo Parzanese from Avellino visited Palena and dedicated the hymn to its Patron, San Falco.