Fossacesia has 6,217 inhabitants on a rise to the left of the mouth of the Sangro, a couple of kilometres from the sea. On the tufa spur that looks over the gulf stands the abbey of San Giovanni in Venere, where a pagan temple of Venus once stood: the Christians built their church on top of it and left the goddess her name, so that the bay below is still called the Gulf of Venus today. The abbey was founded in 1004, rebuilt in Romanesque style by a monk named Oderisio, sacked by the Turks in the sixteenth century, and keeps a stone portal covered with bas-reliefs.
The name of the town, on the other hand, is a small history of wear. In a diploma of the emperor Henry VI of 1195 the place is called Fossamcaecam, the blind ditch; then it becomes Fossacieca, then Fossa Ceca in two words, joined into one at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and only in 1863 does the present form appear, which no longer says what it meant. Along the coast stand the trabocchi, the old wooden fishing machines pushed out over the water, recovered in the new millennium; and in 1943, during the battle of the Sangro, the town was heavily bombed: there is a well-known photograph of general Montgomery among the rubble of the church of San Donato.
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📅 Every year, on 6 and 7 August, in a calendar that spans the Madonna del Carmine to Saint Roch in summer
Fossacesia celebrates Saint Donatus on 6 and 7 August, in the church dedicated to him. Summer also brings the Feast of the Madonna del Carmine in Fossacesia Marina on 16 July and the feast of Saint Roch in Villa Scorciosa on 16 August.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Fossacesia, but an easy day trip away.
