Frisa

The sanctuary of the Madonna del Popolo was built in the sixteen hundreds at a crossroads where there had been a votive shrine, and on the altar hung an image of the Virgin painted on canvas in the fifteen hundreds. On the thirtieth of December 1980 thieves carried it off. The parish priest and some of the faithful went to ask for it back on television, on the programme Portobello, and nothing came of it. But the painter Pietro Annigoni heard that appeal and offered the village a painting of his own to put in the place of the stolen one. The community accepted the new image, obviously very different from the old one, which was consecrated on the eighth of December 1981 and set on the altar. It was not the first thing that sanctuary had lost: in 1943, retreating from the Sangro front, the Germans mined the bell tower, which collapsed onto the rest of the church and destroyed it almost entirely; only the presbytery survived, and the building was rebuilt by the faithful after the war.

The first documents are of the eleventh century and they concern a woman: the wife of Trasmondo the third, count of Chieti, was the real feudatory of this territory, which she had brought him as her dowry, and in 1055 she left the castle of Frisa with the church of Santa Lucia to Montecassino by testamentary donation. Her husband was against it and occupied the place; only two years later, at the intercession of pope Victor the second, did he hand it over to the monks. In a bull of 1057 the same pope lists Frisa among the castles that had been formed by fortifying pre-existing Benedictine monasteries — and it is from that that we know the oldest core of the village grew around the monastery, and probably thanks to it. The registers also count the households: sixty-two hearths in 1447, fifty-five in 1601, sixty-seven in 1737. And here the drove road coming from L'Aquila towards Foggia met the one coming down from Rocca Roseto.