Montazzoli

For nearly six centuries Montazzoli was in a different province from the one that surrounded it: from 1231 it was joined to the Giustizierato of Molise and became an exclave inside Abruzzo Citra, while remaining in the diocese of Chieti; only in 1807 was it put back into Abruzzo. Meanwhile, in 1686, it had absorbed the università of Baselice and Civita del Conte. The village grew around a signal tower raised between the ninth and the twelfth century, where a branch of the sheep track came in from Civita del Conte towards the Masseria Baronessa; the first nucleus was made of the servants' houses and the workshops attached to the castle, and from 1270 the documents begin to call the settlement a castrum. Its shape was given it by the ground, and it is still the same: two hills on a north-south line, Colle San Carlo to the south and Colle Ripa to the north, with a small plain between them where the newer houses stand. The castle is on Colle Ripa, which is the lower of the two: but it offered more cover and more shelter.

The church of Santa Maria della Spogna takes its name from the ground it stands on: carbonate rocks which here they call sponges, the kind that karst formations make. In 1771 it was completely ruined and abandoned, and it was restored in 1824 at the intercession of the archpriest Rocco Franceschelli; the organ inside carries an inscription saying it was built in 1890. The rest of the village is a calendar. There is a fair or a feast almost every month: San Giuseppe on the twenty-eighth of March, San Michele on the eleventh of May, Sant'Antonio on the third of June and San Nicola, the patron, on the fourth; San Giovanni Battista at the hamlet of Fonte San Giovanni on the twenty-fourth; the Madonna della Spogna on the second of July and Sant'Anna on the twenty-fourth; the feast of the Mountain on the second Sunday of August and San Rocco on the fifteenth, with his fair on the third of September; the Rosary on the eleventh of October and San Martino on the eleventh of November.