Casacanditella

The official name of this village comes from the medieval Latin casa candidus, the white house, and is explained by a practical habit: the walls of dwellings were painted white for reasons of hygiene. In dialect, however, Casacanditella is called something else: Li Schiavunë, that is, the Slavs. It is not a nickname out of thin air. In the sixteenth century Serbo-Croat families arrived here, called in to repopulate the area and bring its land back under cultivation, and in the countryside they built the pinciaie, houses of raw earth like those they had left behind: they can still be seen, above all towards the neighbouring comune of Casalincontrada. Of their language and their traditions, on the other hand, almost nothing has remained, because in a short time the Abruzzese population absorbed everything. What is left is the village's nickname, a few surnames and a few place names: a whole community recognisable only by what the neighbours go on calling it.

The village stands on a hill of the Val di Foro, on the watershed between the river Foro and the Dendalo torrent, in a countryside full of scattered houses. There was already a settlement in Roman times, as the excavations say, but the first historical mention is of the ninth century; in the eighteenth it appears as a fief of the De Letto and then of the Valignani. In the hamlet of Semivicoli, at its highest point, stands the baronial castle, built between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the residence of the dukes of Canosa Sannita, who kept it until 1790, when they sold it to a family of merchants from Sulmona; it then passed to the Valignani and the Perticone, was long abandoned and has finally been restored: today it is a hotel and the seat of a wine estate. In the village the parish church of San Gregorio is baroque, its façade divided in two by a cornice and with a clock set above one of the pilasters; on 17 January the farchie of Sant'Antonio are lit.