sulmona
 
Flanked by bleak mountains and bristling with legends about its most famous son, Ovid, SULMONA is a rich and comfortable provincial town owing its wealth to gold jewellery and sugar almonds. An atmospheric little place, with a dark tangle of a historical centre lined with imposing palaces, its sights can be seen in a day, but the town makes a good base for exploring the surroundings, and you may want to stay longer.

The Town
Corso Ovidio , Sulmona's main street, cuts through the centre from the park-side bus terminus, leading up to Piazza XX Settembre , an intimate square that's home to the Art Nouveau Gran Caffè (closed Wed). Nowadays the elegant twists and curlicues of the wrought-iron lamps on its terrace have a soundtrack of blipping video games, but it makes a nice spot for sipping a drink. A couple of minutes back up Corso Ovidio, the Annunziata is Sulmona's architectural showpiece, a Gothic-Renaissance palazzo adjoining a flamboyant Baroque church. These days, its steps are a hangout for the town's lads during the evening passeggiata, but once they would have been crowded with Sulmona's ill and destitute: the Annunziata housed a hospital, a pharmacy and a store of grain, donated by the rich and shared out to the needy. It was established by a confraternity to take care of the citizens from birth until death, and most of the external decoration is designed to remind onlookers of the life process: around the first door is a tree of life; an allegorical frieze with scenes from the cultivation of the vine representing birth, marriage and death stretches right across the facade; a sunburst-style wheel of life stands above a window; and statues of saints gaze piously down from pedestals, firmly placing the symbolism in a Christian context. The most intriguing statue, however, is just inside the entrance: Ovid, metamorphosed from pagan poet of love into an ascetic friar. Inside the Annunziata are three museums : one (Tues-Thurs 9.30am-1pm & 4.30-7pm; Fri, Sat & Sun by request at tourist office; free) with exhibits on local costume and transhumance - the practice of moving sheep to summer pastures - and examples of work by Sulmona's Renaissance goldsmiths, a trade that continues here today, as evidenced by the number of jewellers' shops along the Corso. Another, the Museo Civico (Mon-Sat 9am-1pm, Sun 10am-1pm & 4-7pm; L1000/¬0.52) has local sculpture and paintings from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries; and a third the Museo 'in situ' (daily 9am-1pm & 3-8pm; free) shows the excavations of a Roman villa inhabited from the first century BC to the second century AD, abandoned suddenly along with many other houses in the valley when a landslide or an earthquake struck. Among the fragments of fabulously coloured wall painting are depictions of Pan, Eros, Dionysus and Ariadne, and there are several floor mosaics, all well-labelled. More monochromatic mosaics from a seventh century church and a Roman villa can be seen in excavations at the church of Santo Gaetano (open by appointment through the tourist office or contact Cooperativa Aprutium tel 0864.212.711, aprutium@libero. it).

The Corso's shops are also full of Sulmona's other great product - confetti , a confection of sugar almonds twisted with wire and ribbons into elaborate flowers. Through ingenious marketing the Sulmonese confetti barons have made gifts of their sugar almond sculpture de rigueur at christenings and confirmations throughout Catholic Europe. At Abruzzese weddings, bride and groom are painfully pelted with loose white confetti . Most apparent in the Corso's shops, however, are the brashly coloured giant daisies designed to tempt kids and tourists.

At Piazza XX Settembre, the weighty Romanesque portal of San Francesco della Scarpa was the only part of the church solid enough to withstand the 1703 earthquake. The church gets its name - delle Scarpe means "with the shoes" - from the fact that Franciscans wore shoes instead of the sandals worn by other monastic orders. Opposite, the impressive Gothic aqueduct, built to supply water to the town and power to its wool mills, ends at a fifteenth-century fountain, the Fontana del Vecchio , named for the chubby-cheeked old man on top. On the other side of the aqueduct is Piazza Garibaldi , a vast square dominated by the austere slopes of Monte Morrone, on which the hermit Pietro Morrone lived until he was dragged away to be made pope . There's a former nunnery in the corner - take a look at the courtyard, where there's a tiny door at which unmarried mothers were permitted to abandon their babies.

For centuries, women suffering from the opposite problem - infertility - would visit a Roman ruin outside the town once known as Ovid's Villa, where they would pray to the poet, who was seen as some kind of fertility god. A stone phallus then lay upon the steps although archeologists have now put paid to the myth by identifying the ruin as the Sanctuary of Hercules Curinus . The site is wonderfully evocative beneath a rocky crag topped by the hermitage of pope Celestino V, with fine views over the valley to the Maiella massif. To get there, take a bus to Bagnatura/Badia, get off after the prison and walk up the hill. On entering the site, (free access) remains of stairs, terrace and portico lie to the right; to the left is a small chamber dating back to the first century BC with substantial pieces of coloured plaster on the walls and with a well-preserved mosaic pavement decorated with leaping dolphins and a sheaf of thunderbolts, the symbol of Jupiter, Hercules's father. Devotees of Hercules would leave their offerings to the god on a stone block at the end of the wall backing this chamber and then continue up to the channelled spring, a sacred element for the cult. The Ovid connection continues at the spring where - so local legend has it - Ovid was caught making love to a fairy or (for sceptics) to the Emperor Augustus's granddaughter, Julia.