Miglianico

On Miglianico's coat of arms there are nine ears of millet, and before 1996 there was a whole sheaf: canting arms built on the sound of the name. The name, though, has nothing to do with millet: it comes from the Latin Aemilius with the suffix -anicus, which marks possession, the same formation as nearby Bucchianico and Caramanico. In the Catalogus Baronum the place is Mellianum, a fief of three knights held by one Riccardus Trogisii, of a Norman family that had come to Abruzzo with Roberto di Loretello; in a bull of Alexander III of 16 June 1176 it is Milianica, and in the following centuries it becomes Molianico and then Milianico.

In 1324 there was a church of San Pantaleone outside the village. After a Saracen raid in 1492, which probably destroyed it, the saint's statue was hidden inside a kiln, and it was found again soon after: on Saint Lawrence's day, they say, which is why the feast of the finding is still kept in August. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the statue was carried in solemn procession into the church of San Michele Arcangelo, and that procession became the feast of the Coming of San Pantaleone, on the last Sunday of October. The cult travelled beyond the village: Gabriele D'Annunzio devoted one of his Novelle della Pescara to it and Francesco Paolo Michetti painted Il voto. The castle, raised from the eleventh century and rebuilt in 1515 by the Valignani barons, was gutted by the bombing; around 1950 the architect Francesco Bonfanti rebuilt it as a modern castle, with the help of his friend Gio Ponti, using the bricks from the old one's rubble and fitting it with anodized aluminium windows.