Aielli

Aielli is a small Marsican town in the province of L'Aquila, surrounded by the mountains of the Sirente Velino regional natural park. From its 1,030 meters above sea level, Aielli dominates the vast Fucino plateau which once housed the lake of the same name and which is today the center of a remarkably developed agricultural economy.

The territory, although isolated and closed between a ring of mountains, has always been frequented and affected by the upheavals of history, starting from the Marsi and the Romans up to the drying up of the lake officially concluded in 1878 and the subsequent peasant struggles.

In the community of this small town, historically linked to the land and to its rural and pastoral culture, particular exceptions emerge over time: those privileged few who had the opportunity to study (Filippo Angelitti, Vincenzo Tedeschi, Don Andrea Di Pietro) turned their curiosity and their intelligence to astronomical and theological studies, inaugurating that relationship, that contact, that dialogue with the cosmos that continues today inside the Torre delle Stelle. The medieval tower, which was once a strategic military point for observing movements in the valley, is today an observatory of a different nature: a point from which to explore and study the sky, the universe and its inhabitants.