Bucchianico

The hill stayed empty for a long time. All around, the land had been farmed for centuries, because this was the ager of Teate and the Roman families of the town held estates here — the Aufidii, the Sulpicii, the Mucii, the Lutii — and some hear those names still in today's surnames, Sulpizio, Di Luzio, Di Muzio; the Aufidii's burials at Casoria came to light in 1836, and Mommsen cited one of their gravestones. But the hill itself was wooded, without water and open to every wind: the one reason to climb it, safety, was of no use to anyone as long as the empire held.

Then it was. In 881 the Saracens destroyed the abbey of Santo Stefano di Rivomare and the port city of Buca, and the likeliest account is that it was Buca's refugees who took this uninhabited hill, with the blessing of the bishop of Chieti: the name would be Buca worn down through Bucano, Bucclano, Bucanico. The indirect proof is in the accounts: Bucchianico always had two or three times as many hearths as the villages around it, and that is hard to explain without an arrival from outside. Before the Normans the place was called Fara di San Silvestro, and its oldest quarter is still called Farciola. From here, on 25 May 1550, came Camillo de Lellis: a quarrelsome boy, then a soldier of fortune and a dice player, who ended up in Rome to have a foot ulcer treated at the hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili, where he was taken on as an orderly and dismissed for idleness after a hundred and thirty-one days in all. He went back, stayed nine years, and in August 1582 founded with five companions the Ministers of the Sick, the order that adds a fourth vow: to care for the sick even at the risk of one's life. A saint since 1746, he is the patron of the sick, of nurses and of hospitals.