A single watchtower rose here in the 10th century, and by the 1200s it had grown into a walled fortress with four round corner towers ringing a taller keep, the highest stronghold in the Apennines at 1,460 meters.
The 1461 earthquake that leveled much of nearby L'Aquila cracked Rocca Calascio too, and unlike the town below it was never rebuilt: the empty walls have watched over the sheep tracks beneath the Gran Sasso ever since. That emptiness is exactly what drew filmmakers, and the fortress has stood in for other centuries in Ladyhawke, The Name of the Rose and The American. A short walk downhill, the octagonal seventeenth-century church of Santa Maria della Pietà, with its own clear view of the ruin, is often the more peaceful stop.
