Lanciano

Lanciano keeps what tradition holds to be the first eucharistic miracle in the history of the Church: in the eighth century, so the story goes, host and wine turned into flesh and blood in the hands of a monk who doubted; the relics are venerated in San Francesco, and pilgrims come from all over the world. The name, though, does not come from the lance: it comes from Anxanum, the town of the Frentani. The lance the city put there itself, in 1464, when it gave itself arms showing a lance pointing at the sun — almost certainly the lance of Longinus, the soldier who pierced the side of Christ, whose cult here is very old; and some think a church dedicated to him stood exactly where the convent of San Francesco stands now.

The real wealth came from the fairs, two a year, which in the fourteenth century made Lanciano the most populous town in Abruzzo. In 1212 Frederick II declared it a demanial city — belonging to no feudal lord, administered by the king — with goods exempt from duty and the right to elect the Mastrogiurato, a magistrate who during the fairs held the powers of the Royal Judge: that is what the town still re-enacts in costume. At its height it owned more than forty fiefs and minted its own coin. Then one day the viceroy of Naples sold it to a marquis, and Lanciano spent a century refusing to acknowledge him: it kept the lord from taking possession, sued him as far as Madrid, and in 1647, with Masaniello, tore down his arms. It became demanial again only in the seventeen hundreds. On the fifth and sixth of October 1943 the young men of Lanciano took up arms against the Germans and held them for two days: eleven of them died, and the city was given the gold medal. Before that, during the war, there had been an internment camp here for foreign Jews and antifascists. The old town, between Santa Maria Maggiore with its portal signed by Petrini and the torri Montanare, deserves the slow halt that inland Abruzzo knows how to impose.