Pretoro

The village clings to a scarp on the eastern side of the Maiella, and has the shape of a triangle that narrows as it climbs. The name, by one explanation, comes from Praetorium: a watch post over the passage between the valley where the Peligni lived and the area of the Marrucini and the Frentani. By another it comes instead from preta, which in the dialect of Abruzzo means stone, and by extension the places where stones abound — and here they do. The old borgo, the one you see today, took shape around 1600, after the destruction of the castle: the Castrum Pretorii de Theti, perched on the point of the rock, which was garrisoned by a squire and twelve servants. It was then that the main settlement moved from the valley up the mountain. In the State Archive of Chieti a plan of 1854 is kept which still shows everything: the two churches and the ruins of the castle.

All around are the beech woods, and with that wood the men of Pretoro carved for centuries — it was the village's trade, along with the sheep, which after the first war numbered ten thousand head. In the church of San Nicola the cult of San Domenico is kept, and for him the feast of Lu Lope, the wolf, and that of the serpari, the snake handlers, are performed every year. Above the village, then, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna della Mazza, a hermitage founded by the Cistercians as a dependency of Santa Maria Arabona: the Madonna is painted there with a sceptre in her hand, which here is called a mazza, and people climb up in pilgrimage on the first Sunday of July. Of her they tell that once, on the second of July, it snowed so hard that the procession was stopped, and so she went back to the mountains by herself, leaving her footprints in the snow.