Cupello

In 1577 the Dominican Serafino Razzi, passing through, wrote down the village's name: Villa degli Schiavoni, the village of the Slavs. After the earthquake of 1456 the d'Avalos of Vasto had repopulated it with people fleeing the Balkans, and settlements of that kind were common between Abruzzo and northern Campania; but only in Molise did those communities keep their language, and at Cupello no trace of it is left. Nobody will swear to the real meaning of the name: the soundest guess is the clay pits that produced the cuppelle, the tiles used to roof huts; oral tradition prefers the Latin in lucum pellere, to push into the woods. In the gallery of maps of the Vatican Museums the village appears as Copola.

The twentieth century arrived twice. In 1943 Cupello lay on the Barbara Line and housed a German command: the Anglo-American bombing killed a hundred and six of its people. Then, in April 1961, AGIP announced that under these fields lay a methane field good for two and a half million cubic metres a day — and announced at the same time that the gas would go by pipeline to the industrial area of Lazio and the steelworks of Terni. The village protested until November: the Cupello 2 well was occupied, roads were blocked, five hundred carabinieri and policemen were sent in. It ended with a government undertaking to bring a factory here, which in May 1962 became the Società Italiana Vetro. One of Cupello's squares is named 8 October 1961.