Piazza Benedetto Croce is at the heart of Montenerodomo, in the highest part of the town and hosts the main buildings of the civil, social and religious life: the Town Hall, the War Memorial and the Parish Church San Martino and Santa Giusta as well as a terrace with a fascinating view on the Maiella massif. Until last century there was also the house of the Croce family, the wealthiest and most prominent family of the town. A plaque was set on 24 September 1966 in its memory: “Here was the house – destroyed by the war – of the Ancestors – of Benedetto Croce – whose eternal works – made this place sacred – to his fellow citizens”.

The son of Pasquale Croce and Luisa Sipari, Benedetto was born in Pescasseroli on 25 February 1866, he always lived in Naples, never forgot Abruzzo and his two beloved towns: Montenerodomo and Pescasseroli about which he wrote a monography basing on the searches he made in those places to find his relatives. He searched thoroughly the municipal and parish archives, his family house and the De Thomasis mansion and collected the results in his “History of the kingdom of Naples”. Thinking over his days in Montenerodomo in 1919, Croce gives proof of his intimate bound with Abruzzo: “I have always been aware that something in my temperament can’t be Neapolitan… I’ve often said to myself: - You are not Neapolitan, you are abruzzese! – and in this memory I have found some pride and a great strength. You see now how much grateful I must be to this land and to my Ancestors!”.

The gratitude of Benedetto Croce, the main ideologist of liberalism of the Twentieth Century, and of Montenerodomo extends, in that same square, also to all military and civil war casualties. Their names are engraved in the monument created in 2006 by the artist Mario Di Francesco: a red granite memorial stone with a white ovoid, a symbol for life springing again from sacrifice and martyrdom.

[Credits | Text: Ottavio Di Renzo De Laurentis | Translation: Mirella Rapa | Voice and music: Studio Qreate | Photo: Laura Di Biase]