Rapino

Near the Grotta del Colle, above Rapino, a bronze plate fifteen centimetres by fifteen was found, called the Tabula Rapinensis. On it is written, in the Marrucinian dialect, a sacred law tied to the cult of Jupiter, and there are two words that are worth the whole object: the touta marouca, that is the people of the Marrucini, and the ocre Tarincria, the fortified settlement that stood next door. Theodor Mommsen studied it in 1846 to understand how the Marrucini spoke and what they believed, and it is one of the few texts of theirs that survive. Today that plate is not in Abruzzo and not even in Italy: it is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. From the same cave comes also the statuette known as the goddess of Rapino, which instead is in the archaeological museum La Civitella at Chieti. The cave is worth the climb in any case: it is a natural cavity full of stalactites, and at its entrance are the remains of the Christian hermitage — first Sant'Angelo della Grotta, then Santa Maria de Cryptis — built on the base of an Italic temple. In 1604 a traveller, Alessandro Canzires, described it as a marvellous cave all hollowed out of the living rock, with a circumference of two hundred paces and a chapel in the middle.

Of the twentieth century another thing must be told. Between 1940 and 1943 the fascist authorities designated Rapino as a place of civil internment for the foreign Jewish refugees who were in Italy: the internees were twenty-four, one of the largest groups in the province of Chieti. After 8 September 1943, with the German occupation, the arrests began: six former internees of the Wohlgemuth family, taken in December of that year, died at Auschwitz; the others managed to hide or to reach the already liberated areas of the south. For the sacrifices of its people and for the partisan struggle the comune holds the war cross for military valour. Today Rapino lives on ceramics — it even has a museum of them — and on olive oil, and lies almost entirely inside the Maiella national park; in the church of San Lorenzo there is a fourteenth-century bell which in all likelihood comes from the destroyed monastery of San Salvatore a Maiella.