Pennadomo

The name Pennadomo explains itself, once you know how to read it: «penna» comes from pinna, the boulder that juts out of the ground, and «domo» here means not house but territory. The village of the boulder, in short. It appears as Domo in pinna in 1114, when the bishop of Chieti made over to a hermit of the Maiella the tithes «of the dead and of the living» of Gissi, Pennadomo and Altino. Two centuries later, in 1320, the treasury valued it at three ounces, thirteen tarì and fifteen grana: a whole village entered in the books like a consignment of goods.

The landscape around is all rock and water. The San Leo torrent, which runs down to the Sangro, has cut the gorge of the Gran Giara into the stone; a little further off the lake of Bomba spreads out, which bears the name of another comune but which the road signs here call, without much ceremony, the lake of Pennadomo. In the village there remain the old fountain with its three spouts and two hexagonal basins one inside the other, and the Palazzo Troilo-Valignani, which from its round tower would look fourteenth-century, though no document saying so has ever turned up.