Rocca San Giovanni

The town was founded in the eleventh century by Oderisio the First, abbot of the monastery of San Giovanni in Venere, and enlarged by Oderisio the Second: not as an ordinary settlement, but as a fortified refuge for the monks of their own abbey. The plan was completed underground: from the catacombs of the mother church an emergency passage set out, dug in the Middle Ages, by which the Benedictines of the abbey at Fossacesia could reach the fortified citadel in case of danger. The bombs of the Second World War damaged it beyond repair. The first document naming the town is of the first of March 1046, a diploma of the emperor Henry the Third for the monastery; the walls were raised by the Normans in 1061, and their remains are still there, with a round tower now used as a dwelling.

In 1346 the citizens of Lanciano stormed the town to take the grain stored in it, and in 1381 it was sacked and burned by the count of Manoppello. From 1461 it had a mint of its own, where Innico d'Avalos had gold, silver and copper struck in his name: a mint in a village of two thousand souls. The earthquake of 1626 brought down much of the walls. On the twenty-fourth of January 1863 the mayor Giustino Croce made a public vow to root out brigandage in the municipal territory, which in his words had taken on colossal proportions throughout Italy. At the beginning of the twentieth century a great exodus carried the people of the town to the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia. On the eighth of November 1943 the Germans destroyed the quadrangular tower that everyone called the castle. Below the town stretches the Costa dei trabocchi, with the fishing machines built out over the water.