Castel del Giudice

Castel del Giudice is a town among green mountains overlooking the upper Sagro River valley, 800 meters above sea level. It brings together a small community that, in recent years, has been able to build, with the determination and courage proper to those who live in places where everything is conquest, a present vibrant with life and beauty and a future yet to be written. It is the resilient miracle of mountainous Molise. The town originated in the Middle Ages, probably, as a fortified garrison guarding the upper Sangro Valley (Castellum Judicis and Castrum de Judice), an apparently impassable place but widely frequented since Samnite times because of its proximity to important sheep-track routes. In fact, just downstream from the town, the end of the Castel del Giudice – Sprondasino tratturello is still partially visible, a minor route that made it possible to reach the largest and most important sanctuary of the Samnite civilization, that of Pietrabbondante. The walk through the village is short but pleasant.

On muggy summer days, one rests in the shady 15th-16th century parish church of St. Nicholas of Bari (the patron saint). The canvas depicting the Madonna in Saletta, kept in the small shrine of the same name a few kilometers away from the town, dates to the same period. Also in the village, St. Anthony’s Chapel and the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
The village’s rebirth is centered around several entrepreneurial activities that support the enhancement of the area and its agricultural production, thanks to a virtuous and rare public-private partnership: Borgotufi, a diffuse hotel with a spa and two restaurants that has reclaimed an ancient part of the village abandoned for decades; Melise, a company that grows organic native apples on formerly uncultivated land; a farm brewery, Malto Lento; and a community apiary for the production of mountain honeys.

In Castel del Giudice, in 1369, Jacopo (or Giacomo) Caldora, already considered in his time one of the most valiant and important captains of fortune at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, was born.