Ofena

Ofena sits at 531 meters in a basin under the southern wall of the Gran Sasso, fifty kilometers inland from Pescara. The Vestini, an Italic people, ran their city of Aufinum here before Rome, and the basin sat on the Via Claudia Nova; archaeological remains include large buildings, mosaics and tombs from that period, and a letter from Pope Simplicius dated 19 November 475 names a Bishop Gaudentius of Aufinium. The place is called the Forno d'Abruzzo, the oven of Abruzzo, for a microclimate trapped by the Gran Sasso that pushes summer temperatures above thirty-five degrees and ripens Montepulciano on what may be among the oldest of its slopes.

The Cataldi Madonna estate works the natural amphitheater at the foot of the Calderone, Europe's southernmost glacier. The medieval centro storico is largely intact: walled village, baronial palazzo, the Chiesa di San Nicola di Bari, the Convento di San Francesco and the eighteenth-century Palazzo Cataldi Madonna line streets that the 420 remaining residents share.