San Buono

In the ninth century the Benedictines who administered this part of the Treste valley did an unusual thing: they consecrated the hills of the area to martyr saints, one by one. The one where the village stood fell to the martyr Buono, and the place began to be called mons Sancti Boni, then simply San Buono. It is not only a name: the body of the martyr is still here, in the crypt of the parish church of San Lorenzo, under the village that carries his name. In the tenth century the Attoni, counts of Chieti, raised the castle in the middle of the settlement and the walls with a single gate, the porta da piedi, and the village became castrum Bonum. Remaining a church possession, though, the fief was not even mentioned in the Catalogus baronum of 1152: the list of the barons of the kingdom skips it, because barons it had none.

Between 1315 and 1320 a famine — or a plague, the sources do not say precisely — struck San Buono and nearby Casalanguida so severely that the surrounding fiefs had to contribute out of their own pockets to set the two villages back on their feet. Then the Caracciolo arrived, and they stayed: the fief passed to them in 1421 by dowry, through the marriage of Marino I Caracciolo and Maria di Sangro, and the family held it for fourteen generations, until the abolition of feudalism in 1806; from 1590 the village was even a principality, and the first prince had the convent of Sant'Antonio built outside the gate in 1575. The arms of the comune, today, are still theirs. The hills, for that matter, were sacred long before the martyrs: in 1986 the excavations at Fonte San Nicola brought to light a Frentan sanctuary of the ninth or eighth century before Christ, and a second sanctuary stood between Pantano and Vusco.