Castel Frentano

The town was called Castel Nuovo until after unification; then, so as not to be confused with all the other Castelnuovo in the new kingdom, it took the name of the ancient Italic people of the Frentani. That kingdom, however, it had not wanted: one evening in 1861 the tricolour was hauled down from the parish bell tower and the old Bourbon flag hoisted in its place. On the thirty-first of July 1881 a landslide destroyed the eastern part of the old centre, and in the century that followed works were needed to hold the hillside still.

Between 1940 and 1943 Castel Frentano was one of the Abruzzo comuni designated by the fascist authorities as a place of civil internment for the foreign Jewish refugees then in Italy: nineteen were interned here, one of the largest groups in the province of Chieti. After the eighth of September 1943, once the German troops arrived, fourteen of them were arrested in early November, taken to the camp of Bagno a Ripoli and from there deported and killed at Auschwitz; five managed to avoid capture. The town was liberated by the New Zealand division on the second of December 1943.