The village carries the christian name of a man: in 1421 Maria de Sangro married Marino Caracciolo and brought him Castiglione as her dowry, and in honour of that feudatory the place added his name to its own. Of the castle that gives it the first half of the name nothing is left but a district still called castello. It stands at a thousand metres, on the ridge between Abruzzo and Molise, and on the mountain above it two rivers are born that then go opposite ways: the Treste, which ends in the Trigno, and the Sinello, which after some forty kilometres reaches the sea. Near the summit there is a small lake shaped like a figure of eight, with a large part and a small one, by now almost all reed bed and slowly filling in. In the twelfth century the place appears in the book that al-Idrisi, the Arab geographer, compiled for Roger the second: he calls it Quatllun and puts it twenty-four miles from Fallo and fifteen from Agnone.
The event that marked the village happened on an Easter Sunday. On the first of April 1861, during mass, the call to arms went out, and men led by Pietro Troiano killed every prominent person in the place: the mayor Gaetano Magnacca, the captain Giacomo Lonzi and his son Eliodoro, the lawyer Raffaele Magnacca and his son Giuseppe, the judge Michele De Giorgio. The town was put to fire and sword; when the National Guards arrived order was restored by shooting twenty-three of the rebels and arresting sixty-four, who were heavily sentenced by the assize court of Lanciano in the trial of the fourth of April 1863. The source also explains what lay underneath: from the unification of Italy people here had expected a change in their own condition, and had become convinced that the political events had only consolidated the power of the old masters. It had happened before, in another form: when on the twenty-first of August 1809 four hundred brigands sacked the village, the population did not lift a finger, and that silence too the source reads as anger against the well-off. From here came Loreto Fangio, the father of Juan Manuel.
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📅 Every year, on 10, 11 and 12 September
On 10, 11 and 12 September Castiglione Messer Marino, a municipality of 1,898 inhabitants in the province of Chieti, celebrates its patron San Raffaele.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
