the provincial road which led either to Castel di Sangro or to Lanciano. The "via nuova" was the only road of the village accessible to cars. There was no pollution, so the smells reached the nostrils in their richness, whether pleasant, like those of the flowers and fields, or pungent, like those of decaying matter, manure and other things. The wind would create waves of these smells that mixed in an olfactory blend of sensations. The streets of Fallo consisted of small and tortuous passages, paved with irregular roughly shaped natural stones held by dirt, and forming a solid surface gradually smoothed by human and animal wear but which always remained somewhat uneven. The rain and occasional sweepings by housewives kept the streets somewhat clean.

Stables for animals were on the ground floor of houses and scattered unevenly through the village. They were periodically cleaned. The manure was removed and brought in burlap sacs by donkeys or mules to the fields. This was the only fertilizer used at this time. But let me go back to the village itself. The streets, as mentioned, were uneven and the one, two or three storied houses were built with gray stone, typical of all the villages in Abruzzo. The houses, like the fields, had been subdivided through the centuries by inheritance. They often had lost their integrity with each subdivision and had assumed a new identity through function (kitchen, cellar, stable, bedroom, storage