Canosa Sannita

Canosa took its second name late: it added it on annexation to the Kingdom of Italy, in 1861, to tell itself apart from Canosa di Puglia, and that «Sannita» refers to the ancient Regio IV Samnium. Before that it was simply Canosa, and its history is a history of divisions. In the ninth century two fare are named here, Lombard settlements belonging to the church of San Silvestro and to the Lombard noble Maione; those properties then passed to the abbey of Montecassino and in 1113 were given to the bishop of Chieti. In the twelve hundreds the castle was in the hands of Guglielmo di San Giuliano, justiciar of Abruzzo and loyal to king Manfred, who put a garrison in it under captain Roano. But the striking thing is the shape of the fief: it was divided into eight frazionamenti, and at the head of each was a different lord. When in 1625 it passed to the Valignani and then to the Celaya, the dominion over those fractions was exercised by the husbands of the family's many daughters. And the fief sat exactly on the boundary between the dioceses of Ortona and Lanciano, which quarrelled over the running of it.

What the village made and what it lost stand side by side. In the fifteen hundreds millstones were made here by hand. From 1862 Canosa was one of the monti frumentari, the institutions that lent grain and cereals to the villages round about: it helped some three hundred people. In those same years brigandage came through — in this territory the brigand Nunziato Mecola is remembered — and just outside the built-up area are the Chicurummelle, natural caves the brigands used to hide in. Then, towards the end of 1943, Canosa was bombed by the Allies and by the Germans fleeing from Ortona, and of the old centre gathered round the castle almost nothing is left: today there are a few medieval walls and a rebuilt parish church. In the eighteenth-century palazzo Martucci is the museum of war and peace, with a thousand or so objects from the two world wars. Of the old economy there remain the wine and the oil.