Poggiofiorito

In Roman times there was a staging post here on the road that led from Guardiagrele to the port of Ortona, and in the nineteen-nineties farmers, digging, brought out a good many finds, now in Chieti. The present village is of the sixteenth century: it was founded by the feudatories of baron Crognale of Arielli, and at the start it was made of three clusters of houses — Casale, Fonte di Pojo, that is the Poggio, and Villarielli, which is today's village. It grew in the middle of the century, when the church of San Matteo was built. And it was actually called Villarielli, the village of Arielli, until the early twentieth century, when the quarrel broke out with the neighbouring comune of Arielli over where the station of the Ortona-Guardiagrele railway would be. The council then decided to change the name, to cut off any reference to a presumed link with, or subjection to, Arielli: by the royal decree of the thirty-first of July 1911 Villarielli became Poggiofiorito.

In 1943 the Germans came to these parts chasing Victor Emmanuel III, who had passed through Crecchio and then Ortona, and the Allies bombed the village hard to drive them out: the church of San Matteo lost its bell tower and most of its fabric, and only some walls and the front were left standing. It was quickly rebuilt following the original style, and restored again at the beginning of the two thousands; the village itself was remade in the sixties. From Poggiofiorito came Tommaso Coccione, an accordionist who at the start of the twentieth century emigrated to America and became well known composing Abruzzese mazurkas and polkas. He died at thirty-six, and his sons Vincenzo and Camillo went on writing popular music — polkas, tarantellas, waltzes, hymns; Vincenzo later made in his own house a museum dedicated to his father's memory. In 1939 the village was chosen as the set of the film Torna caro ideal by Guido Brignone, on the youth of the Ortona composer Francesco Paolo Tosti: in one scene Coccione appears with his band.