Ripa Teatina

The name is a job: this hill served to defend Teate, that is Chieti. In Roman times there was a Castrum Teate here; in the Middle Ages the castle appears as Laripam and the place is called Oppida Ripae, the fortified town; «Ripa» on its own turns up in 1328 in a register of the Chieti curia, and for centuries the village was called Ripa di Chieti, the Latin adjective Teatina establishing itself much later. In 1484 Alfonso of Aragon paid for the walls as a grace for the favours the inhabitants had done him in the wars against the Venetian League, and added a chain of watchtowers, two of which are still standing.

Near the little church of Santo Stefano a Carthaginian helmet was found, proof that Hannibal came through. During the Napoleonic campaign the village's Franciscan convent was the scene of a massacre: rebels who had come from Chieti had taken refuge there, the French laid siege to it, and more than six hundred died in the fighting, soldiers and insurgents together; several rebels escaped, and in reprisal the friars were killed and their bodies thrown into the cistern of the cloister. In the Second World War, with the village right on the Gustav Line, the Germans set up an arms depot here, looted at the liberation between the ninth and the tenth of June 1944.