Santa Maria Imbaro

The village takes its name from a church, and the church took its name from where the road led: it stood on the drove road that ran from L'Aquila to Foggia, the great transhumance route into Puglia, and it was called Sancta Maria in viam Bari, Saint Mary on the road to Bari. That formula became Sancta Maria in Baro and finally Santa Maria Imbaro. The coat of arms says the same thing twice over: seven golden ears of wheat, for the farming this place lives on, and the three silver letters S, M and B. In the old cadastre of Lanciano the village appears instead under yet another name, Santa Maria a Mare.

The place is documented in 1383 and again in 1411, in a deed drawn up during a fair for the sale of a vineyard. Then, after the plagues of the middle of the fifteenth century, it was repopulated by people the documents call schiavoni, from their Slav origin — and the same thing happened in a string of nearby villages: Mozzagrogna, Scorciosa, Stanazzo, Pietra Costantina. In 1807, under Murat, Santa Maria Imbaro was merged with four of those villages into a single Comune delle Ville di Lanciano; in 1816, when Murat fell, it took back its autonomy together with Treglio and Mozzagrogna. Of the drove road that gave it its name a stretch survives at La Selva. And for twenty-seven years, from 1988 to 2015, this village of two thousand people housed a pharmacological research institute, the Mario Negri Sud.