Furci

On the arms of Furci, granted in 1995, stands the Blessed Angelo da Furci himself, upright on a red plain, with the palm in his right hand and an open book in his left, and above him three red capital letters, B, A and F; under the shield, on a flying ribbon, a Latin motto: Patriae suae defensor, defender of his own country. The village has arranged itself around him. His birthplace no longer exists: as early as the fourteenth century it was turned into a church, and landslides forced them to rebuild it several times, but in the crypt they keep the niche where he is said to have lived when the family house still stood. His relics came from Naples in 1808 and stayed in the parish church of San Sabino until 1990, when they were carried to the new sanctuary, in the modern part of the village; the church was raised to a sanctuary in 1993. And the patronal feast is not one day but three: the sixth of February, the seventeenth of May and the thirteenth of September.

The name would come from «small fortress», and a legend explains it: three brothers, one of Monteodorisio, one of Furci and one of Palmoli, are said to have agreed in the ninth century to build a triangle of tower-castles against the Saracen raids. What is documented is that Furci belonged to the fiefs of the Benedictine monastery of Sant'Angelo in Cornacchiano, in the territory of Fresagrandinaria — an abbey which, as the historian Davide Aquilano has shown, rose over a small votive temple beside the Centurelle-Montesecco sheep track — and that in 1324 the churches of Furci were under the diocese of Chieti but paid their tithes to that monastery. Of the medieval castle a tower remains at the entrance to the old centre, its base of the thirteenth or fourteenth century and its upper part of the fifteenth. And after the unification the band of the brigand Giuseppe Pomponio worked here: when the Piedmontese gendarmes attacked Furci, Pomponio died beside a spring, which was called the fonte di Pomponio until 1935, when it fell in.