Palmoli

The village was once called Palmula Monteverde: its people had left the scattered vicus settlements and moved up onto the hill, covered with wild olive trees with dark green leaves. Before them there had been the Frentani and then the Romans; around the year one thousand the people took to the height and built the castle, and in the Catalogus baronum of the twelfth century the place appears as Palmulam, a possession of Filippo di Grandinato, who held it in sub-vassalage for the count of Loreto. In the first half of the fifteenth century it was the fief of Paolo di Sangro, then of the Caracciolo of San Buono and of the Severino-Longo. The marquis castle, of local limestone, sandstone and brick, is made of different pieces put together: a sixteenth-century twelve-sided tower that swallowed an older round tower, the palazzo Severino-Longo and the church of San Carlo Borromeo, which were already there; in the garden the casemates raised for defence still stand. And in one wing of the castle there is a museum that is almost a paradox: the museum of peasant civilisation and of the abandoned castles of the Vasto country — a castle keeping the memory of the castles nobody kept any longer.

In 1943 the territory of Palmoli found itself in the middle of the battle of the Trigno, one of the passages of the war along this line of hills. Today the most deeply felt feast is that of the Madonna del Carmine, spread over three days: on the sixteenth of July the statue goes in procession from the convent to the parish church and stays there; the twenty-sixth is dedicated to Saint Anne and Saint Joachim; and on the morning of the twenty-seventh men and women in traditional costume carry the gifts to the Madonna in the parade of the granoppoli and the pacchianelle, gifts which in the afternoon are auctioned in the village square. The patron, Saint Valentine, is celebrated on the fourteenth of February. In the kitchen there are sagne pezzate, dressed with fresh tomato or with a sauce of asparagus and ventricina — which here is called viscica — and lamb stew. In the Fonte alle Coste locality there is a fountain of 1851, remade in 1898, with a mask looking over the basin.