Mozzagrogna

The village was called Villa Schiavone, because it was founded in the sixteenth century by a colony of Schiavoni: people who had come from the Balkans in flight from the Turks and settled in many country districts between the Marche and Puglia. They had stopped first at Lanciano, and from Lanciano they were driven out, so that they had to look for refuge in the villages round about. The official name has changed — today's comes from a family of Lanciano that owned property here — but in dialect the place is still called Li Scavùne, the Slavs: the name the inhabitants had given themselves has outlived the name of the owners of the land. In the coat of arms, granted in the twentieth century, there is a green sprig flanked by two letters, V and M, for Villa Mozzagrogna. In 1807 the villages that had detached from Lanciano were joined in a single comune, and in 1816 they were separated again, with Pietra Costantina absorbed into the new comune of Mozzagrogna.

The castle of Septe was founded by the Lombards, was a fief of the counts of Chieti, and in 1095 the Norman Roberto di Loritello granted it in perpetuity to bishop Rainolfo of Chieti. In 1259 king Manfred gave the castle with its fief to the city of Lanciano; in 1268 count Philip of Flanders stayed there with his whole family, and in 1308 he was driven out for arrogance. In 1721 a baroness left without heirs gave it to the Genoino, who kept it until the middle of the twentieth century, when the last of the family disappeared mysteriously during the Second World War. That war hit the village hard: the Germans stayed a long time, and almost all the buildings were razed and looted. In April, in one of the hamlets, the parish priest takes the little statue of the Madonna to a family that hosts it; from then on it goes round the houses of whoever asks for it, staying one day in each.