A hill in a valley, a lake that learned the village.

The town is compact, medieval in the bones, a cluster of limestone on a rise in a green bowl. Below it, an artificial lake on the Sava holds the houses twice on still evenings. The territory is mostly mountain, inside the Parco Nazionale del Matese. Three roads find it: from Fontegreca–Capriati a Volturno if you come from Venafro; from Monteroduni if you come from Isernia; from Letino if you come off the high lake of the Matese.

Vallelunga is the frazione, about ten kilometres out, where the red cliff — Masso Rosso, Piescurusc — drops into the gorge. Up in the town, the highest quarter is still called r’ C’m’ntier; a stub of a cylindrical medieval tower remains. There is an eighteenth-century palazzo of the Signori di Bojano in limestone, long empty — not a ruin so much as a paused sentence. The name on those rooms is the same name Gallesi still recognize on a Bronx doorbell and on the spine of the book: Boiano, Bojano, a district that once had enough weight to be written down. The palazzo does not prove every bearer was a lord. It proves the name was never a whisper on this hill. Two churches keep the hill: San Simeone, and Ave Gratia Plena with a late-baroque portal.

People live here now in the mid-four-hundreds, by recent ISTAT counts — a few hundred year-round, more in summer and for Sant’Antonio. That is not a tragedy headline. It is the present tense of a mountain comune that sent its children out and kept the table. For the century of leaving, see History. For the plate, see Food.