San Martino sulla Marrucina

The name puts two things together: Saint Martin, the patron of knights — the village was born from a castle built in Lombard times, between the ninth and the tenth century — and the Marrucina, the road of pre-Roman origin that passes below the hill and leads to Chieti, the ancient Teate, capital of the Marrucini. The double name is of 1863, decided after the unification of Italy so as not to be confused with five other towns of the same name in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But the thing that made this village different from the others is a clandestine trade. From the sixteenth century onwards there was the polveriere here: following an old and secret recipe, handed from father to son and based on vine charcoal, he made gunpowder inside caves dug in the sandy ground of the old centre, with the entrance kept hidden. He was a craftsman and a smuggler at once, because that powder was sold illegally; and towards the end of the nineteenth century some of the polverieri became master pyrotechnicians.

One of those caves can be visited: dug in the sandstone at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it produced powder until the early twentieth, then in the nineteen-thirties it was used for a few years as a snow store, in the fifties it was half filled with the rubble of the bombing, and in 2016 it was recovered with lighting and information panels. Then there is a second trade that left its mark: in the nineteenth century San Martino produced in great numbers the crovelli, sieves with iron mesh, and for this the village is held to be the homeland of the pasta guitar. The church of San Cristinziano, which was the parish church of the old castle, goes back to the tenth century and was partly rebuilt after the damage of the second world war; under its western part is an underground space, the succorpo, restored in 2019. Of the former church of San Martino, instead, nothing remains: built in 1100 and dependent on the Benedictine monastery of the same name, in 1919 a windstorm brought the bell tower down on top of it, and with the building the ciborium of 1151 was lost.