The first historical reference to Gessopalena is to be found in the ninth century ‘Memoratorium’ of Bertario, abbot of Montecassino from 856-883. This list of the monastery’s possessions in the region between the Sangro and Aventino rivers contains a reference to ‘Castello de Gessi’. A couple of centuries later, in 1059, a papal bull of Nicholas II refers to the village as Gipso de Domo. At the time all the villages in the area around the nearby ancient Roman settlement of Juvanum ended in ‘domo’, as indeed some still do today (Montenerodomo and Pennadomo). The papal bull speaks of the ‘parish of S. Maria’ which today corresponds to the parish and church of S. Maria Maggiore. This church, which was completely rebuilt in the nineteenth century, stands close to the chalk outcrop which gives the village its name (‘gesso’ in Italian means chalk). It is therefore thought that the village was built on top of this cliff around the turn of the first Millennium about the time when southern Italy was being occupied by the Normans. There are two legacies of this for Gessopalena today: one is the local name for the Paese Vecchio - the old village (‘A monte per la Terra’ - the village on the mountain), the other is the tiny portal (or doorway) of the church of the Annunciation which was removed from its original location and fixed to the wall of S. Maria Maggiore some 70 years ago. The portal was removed from the 13th-14th century church of the Annunciation which was falling down. The portal shows two winged lions (one of which lost its head during the removal) which were originally set high up on either side of the Gothic arches. This technique is associated with Norman architecture and can be seen in other churches of the region (for example, S. Agostino in Lanciano).
As you enter the village through the archway which once formed part of the ancient Palazzo Persiani, the road divides into two. To the left is the narrow Valle Sorda which, according to the nineteenth century local historian Gennaro Finamore, was the first part to be inhabited; to the right is Via Castello. Unfortunately all the houses in Valle Sorda were pulled down in 1974, but Finamore suggests this was linked to the nearby ‘parish of S. Maria’ by an underground passage which some of the older villagers still talk about. In fact, the ‘parish of S. Maria’ was linked to Valle Sorda by Via del Gallo which, in the 17th/18th centuries was built over and incorporated into the ground floor of Palazzo Persiani. Finamore also records the existence of a sort of tower or archway beyond S. Maria Maggiore in an area which the villagers at the beginning of the nineteenth century already knew as Terranova (the new village). Over the years, this place name has been shifted further and further southwards as new houses have been built along the present Via Peligna. The archway mentioned by Finamore was probably the real entrance to the village which in1173, according to a papal bull of Alexander III, still had the castle mentioned by Abbot Bertario (and hence the name of the street - Via Castello). Unfortunately, no trace of the castle remains today. Via Castello leads to the highest part of the old village, Pie’ di Castello. To the right there is a flight of steps which leads to the church of S. Egidio which was built in the Middle Ages and used as a monastery in the sixteenth century. To the left, is a small square called Largo del Principe which today is rather unkempt. If there was a castle, it seems likely that it was built on the chalk rock a few yards to the right beyond S. Egidio. All you can see now are the cellars which were carved out of the chalk. Beyond S. Egidio, the first site is the church of the Annunciation. All that remains are the floor with a trapdoor leading down to an ossuary (a place to store the bones of exhumed corpses) and part of the back wall. The next sites are the cellars of what was probably a wealthy household, perhaps the castle. If that is the case, then the church of the Annunciation was probably the noble family’s chapel.
The whole area is littered with churches and monasteries, although only place names and a few ruins are left. Along Via Castello you can see four churches. On the left as you go up, the first is S. Antonio with its neoclassical facade. This was the private chapel of the Tozzi family and it now holds up one wing of the house which was almost entirely destroyed during the Second World War. The chapel was built in the second half of the nineteenth century to replace a previous one which was destroyed in a landslide - the whole of the western side of the chalk outcrop has been affected by landslides since the middle of the eighteenth century. Directly opposite S. Antonio is the imposing ruin of S. Maria del Rosario which has been a ruin as long as anyone can remember, apart from the bell tower which was in working order until 1956. Devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary increased after the battle of Lepanto in 1571 (where a certain Giuseppe Persiani from Gessopalena commanded a Venetian galleon) but both before and after this event the church appears to have had many different names. These appear in the lists of the parish visits undertaken by the bishops of Chieti between 1300 and 1500. According to contemporary local historian Nicola Cavaliere, this was probably the church of S. Valentino, the patron saint of the village after the plague of 1656. Beyond the church of the Rosary lie the churches of S. Egidio and the Annunciation which we have already mentioned. S. Egidio was used for religious ceremonies until the start of the last century - the last celebration held there was a wedding in 1908. In 1327 the Blessed Roberto da Salle founded, or maybe rebuilt, the convent of San Giovanni Battista where today there is a small tannery. Da Salle and another local man Rinaldo da Gesso were followers of pope Celestine V. This pope renounced the papacy in 1294, for which he was criticised by Dante in the Divine Comedy. Another monastery, S. Maria de’ Calderali, was dedicated to him and subsequently changed its name to S. Pietro Confessore. The monastery had a chequered history.
The name GESSOPALENA is used after 1481, when the "terra del Gisso", according to the historian Benedetto Croce, became part of the "county of Palena created by Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Naples, and bestowed by him on Matteo di Capua and his descendants".
Over the centuries, the chalk outcrop provided work for hundreds of chalk workers (called ‘gessaroli’, hence the street name Via dei Gessaroli which links Valle Sorda and Via Castello). The mortar which was used to build the Roman settlement at Juvanum probably came from Gessopalena and all the villages around bought chalk from the ‘gessaroli’ who carried it on mules or donkeys sometimes on long and difficult journeys over the Guado di Coccia pass beyond Palena as far as the other side of the Majella. The way to become a ‘gessarolo’ was to obtain a concession from the local town council to excavate, bake and crush the chalk. The process was regulated by law. These were self-employed labourers, riddling the rock with holes and building furnaces, some of which were quite large. Some of these can still be seen today, filled with chalk ready for baking. But it was the two big factories built during the period of reconstruction after the war which were responsible for the collapse of the entire western side of the outcrop (and with it the churches and houses built on the western edge of the village, including S. Egidio and the Annunciation).
Its position high on the rock overlooking the valley below saved the Old Village from both plague and brigands. There used to be a village near the Morgia (a limestone outcrop a few kilometres away, across the valley from the Old Village) called Peschio Rotico. The village was wiped out in the plague at the end of the fourteenth century (the one mentioned by Boccaccio in The Decameron) but Gipso de Domo survived this and later plagues. The church of S. Rocco (patron saint of healing) is close to the entrance of the old village up a narrow street which crosses Via del Gallo and runs between the first few houses of the village and those facing S. Maria Maggiore. This church, among others, is mentioned in the chronicle of a papal visit in 1568. Its location close to the entrance to the village and also to the fountains and springs which were the source of water for the village, point to this being a place where strangers in search of solace or a cure might have rested. Churches dedicated to S. Rocco are located in similar places in other villages.
Apart from the ‘gessaroli’, the other main sources of economic activity were craft work (the lacemakers of Gessopalena and Pescocostanzo are typical of Abruzzo) and agriculture, especially sheep rearing. Piazza Roma (now the main square in the village, which before the fall of Rome in 1870 was called Piazza Vicenna) lies on the route of an ancient trail used for the seasonal migration of sheep. This trail runs from Torricella Peligna to Casoli and thence to the major migration trail from L’Aquila to Foggia, linking the Aventino and Sangro valleys via Palena, Juvanum, Torricella and Bomba. A sidetrack heads down Via Palazzo from Piazza Roma. This street takes its name from the large house (palazzo) built by the parents of Enrico Finamore (father of Gennaro, the local historian mentioned above) at the start of the eighteenth century. The date of construction was found on a tile which was recovered when the building, badly damaged in the Second World War, was finally pulled down in 1974. But Palazzo Finamore was already outside the walls of the Old Village. Between 1600 and 1700 dozens of aristocratic houses were built or rebuilt in the Old Village but all of these have since disappeared, except perhaps the prettiest (according to the older villagers who can also remember others from before the First World War). This is Palazzo Persiani, at the entrance to the village, whose ground floor incorporated the main street into the village (Via Castello) of which only a small archway remains where the road divides with Via Sorda. Beyond lay Palazzo Tozzi (mentioned above) and further on, on the left, Palazzo Pellicciotti, whose outer walls support a path leading to a large terrace which looks out towards the Majella and the Morgia. To travellers approaching from Torricella this western side of the old village looks almost like it belongs to a fairy tale. Opposite the Palazzo Pellicciotti, there are a number of restored buildings (a stable, an oil press, some small shops) which once formed the basement of the houses of the Alfieri and another Pellicciotti families. There is another building with several entrances carved out of the rock at the end of Via del Castello opposite the church of the Annunciation and the supposed castle. This is where, in the nineteenth century, Marino Turchi, professor of health and hygiene at the university of Naples, was born. These families - the Persianis, the Finamores, the Alfieris, the Tozzis, the Turchis and the Pellicciottis - were the feudal barons who owned all the land and controlled the life of the village and the surrounding area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that time most of the cultivated land was close to the churches and the monasteries and the rest was woodland. The peasants lived in the villages in squalid hovels of one or two overcrowded rooms heated by the animals in the basement stables. This poverty is reflected in the way the houses in the Old Village are built: partly excavated from the rock and partly improvised from limestone rocks collected from the countryside and held together with chalk cement.
When feudalism was abolished (in 1806 when Joseph Bonaparte became king of Naples) the peasants began to cut down the woodland in search of land to cultivate. The lives and conditions of the peasants after the unification (1870) are memorably described by Finamore in his ‘Le condizione economiche-agricole di Gessopalena’.
In the seventeenth century, the profession of lawyer and notary was practised by the Sirolli and Del Peschio families, but these names have since disappeared from the parish registers. In fact, between 1580 and 1873, Gessopalena produced 24 lawyers - a very high number for the time and only the larger towns of Chieti, Lanciano, Vasto and Attessa produced more.
In 1705 there was a terrible earthquake in the Majella. Many of the houses of the aristocracy were rebuilt and even extended during the following century but already the population was beginning to spread beyond the main gate of the Old Village, leading to the establishment of the new neighbourhood of Via del Popolo to the south-west of the village. The new social classes sought liberation from the Old Village, abandoning it to the landless labourers, the old aristocracy and a few artisans. Life was teeming in the Old Village but the crowded conditions led to both sociability and promiscuity, life-long or fleeting hatreds and passions. Local rivalries grew up between the inhabitants of the Old and New Villages which lasted even up to the 1950s when bands of young children would line up against each other, armed with stones, arrows and wooden swords, mimicking the battles of the War which only 15 years before had laid waste almost the whole of Gessopalena, from the ancient houses at Pie’ di Castello all the way to the brand new houses along Via Peligna.
From the papal bull of 1059 to the children’s war games in 1959, for a thousand years the chalk outcrop was the foundation stone for the life of a community of villagers. Since then it has been completely abandoned by its last inhabitants, and even the children don’t play there any more.