Crecchio

Crecchio stands on a hill that two watercourses, the Arielli and the Rifago, have cut away and isolated; around it run the comb valleys typical of the Abruzzo hills, narrow parallel gullies where travertine crops out and laurel grows thick, and in the streams the river crab can still be seen. Tradition has it that in antiquity the inhabitants lived further off, in the hamlet of Santa Maria Cardetola, and among the finds from those hills is a mother goddess of the upper Palaeolithic. The village has kept the shape of a small medieval borgo, dominated by its castle, which is of the twelfth century and was turned into a residence in 1789, becoming the house of the de Riseis family.

In that castle, on the tenth of September 1943, two days after the armistice, Victor Emmanuel III stopped for a night during his flight from Rome: from here he went down to the port of Ortona and left Italy. It was the last night the king spent in the country. Today the castle holds a museum. On the hills around, the vines are Montepulciano and Trebbiano, and Crecchio is one of the most beautiful borghi in Italy.