The tratturi of Castel del Monte and the transumanza

Castel del Monte stands at 1,346 metres on the southern slope of the Gran Sasso, in the heart of the national park that bears the same name, in the province of L'Aquila. The village is built of grey limestone, its narrow lanes climbing toward a church and a medieval castle, and it looks out over the open, wind-swept plateaus of the Rocche — a landscape that allows no unnecessary ornament. It is precisely this geographic austerity that shaped the vocation of the place for centuries: not farming, but pastoralism, and with it the transumanza, the seasonal migration of flocks.

The tratturi that set out from this area were grass tracks of codified width — 111 metres, according to the Neapolitan measure known as the miglio regio (royal mile) — along which flocks moved twice a year between the summer pastures of the Apennines and the winter pastures of the Tavoliere delle Puglie. The main tratturo serving this territory was the Tratturo Magno, also known as L'Aquila–Foggia, one of the longest in the entire Italian tratturo network, running for some 244 kilometres. These were not simple paths: they were infrastructure formally recognised by the Bourbon state, regulated by law, watched over by customs posts, and crossed by tens of thousands of head of livestock every season.

Along these corridors moved not only animals and shepherds, but goods, coin, and words. Dialects mixed, recipes were exchanged, cults blended into one another. The transumante shepherd of Castel del Monte was no marginal wanderer: he was often the owner of sizeable flocks, dealing directly with merchants from Puglia and with the institutions of the Kingdom. The economy built on wool and pecorino cheese — particularly canestrato, still made in this area today — carried weight on an interregional scale.

In 2019, Mediterranean transumanza, with a decisive contribution from the communities of the central Apennines, Castel del Monte among them, was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, in a nomination shared by Italy, Greece and Austria. The recognition formally confirmed what local memory had already preserved: that the seasonal movement of flocks was a system of knowledge, practices and social relationships handed down orally from generation to generation, not reducible to economics alone.

Today the tratturi have partly vanished beneath ploughed fields and infrastructure, and partly survive as traces in the landscape — lines of taller grass, faint dips in the ground, place names that linger on cadastral maps. Around Castel del Monte some of these routes can still be walked, and the village's domestic architecture still bears the marks of a wealth built on wool: portals of worked stone, houses larger than a mountain village would seem to need, churches furnished in a way that speaks of patrons who were far from poor. Transumanza ceased to be the dominant economic practice over the course of the twentieth century, but the landscape it produced — physical and intangible alike — remains legible to anyone who knows where to look.