The American | Rocca Calascio — The Empty Hillside He Fires Into

Somewhere above the town of Calascio, Jack pulls off a track, assembles a rifle he has built out of scrap and a car part, and fires it into an empty hillside to hear what it does. Location guides place the weapons testing and the long solitary drives in this stretch of high country, and standing in it you understand the choice at once: there is nobody for kilometres, and the sound has nowhere to go but up.

Above the town sits the reason everyone else comes. Rocca Calascio is a ruined fortress at 1,460 metres, the highest in the Apennines, built to watch the sheep roads and the Navelli plain rather than to house anyone important. An earthquake in 1461 took most of it down. What remains is a square keep, four round corner towers, and a horizon that runs all the way to the Majella. Below it, alone on the ridge, stands the octagonal church of Santa Maria della Pietà — the image that made this place famous decades before Corbijn arrived with a camera.

The road stops short of the castle on purpose. The last stretch is a stony footpath, twenty minutes uphill. Do it in the final hour of light: the Gran Sasso goes copper, the plain below drops into shadow, and the wind at the keep is loud enough that you would never hear a car coming. Everyone who has seen the film thinks about that.

Photo: Interocitore via Pexels (Pexels licence).