Carunchio

The village used to stand somewhere else, perhaps at Taverna, and was moved up here to defend itself better from the raids of Saracens and Slavs; the name appears in 1173, in a bull about the boundaries of the diocese of Chieti. The borgo climbs in concentric rings to the top, where the ruins of the castle are left, and in the land register of 1742 there is a via dei Rinforzi, the street of the Reinforcements: it ran where the walls and the wall-houses stood.

The village fountain was to cost a little over sixty ducats; a landslide made them rebuild it in 1844 for a hundred and fifty, and when it was finished, in 1863, seven thousand had been spent. In the church of San Giovanni Battista there is an eighteenth-century organ made by recycling the pipes of an older one, and on its case putti are playing the bagpipes.