Scerni

Scerni grew by absorbing what died around it. It appears in 883 as castellum Scerni, given to the monastery of Santo Stefano in Rivo Maris, and it stayed under that jurisdiction until the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the abbey was destroyed. Then the village took in one abandoned fief after another: Materno in the fourteenth century, the Selva della Bardella in the eighteenth, and in 1807 both the università of Villa Ragna, an old uninhabited fief repopulated in the sixteenth century, and the former fief of Planisio, shared out with Gissi and Atessa. The fortified village lies between two tratturi, the Lanciano-Cupello to the north and the Centurelle-Montesecco to the south.

In 1853 the woods of Bardella and Aragno were felled, and the cleared ground went over to crops. Seven years later, between the twenty-fifth and the twenty-seventh of February 1860, more than a thousand peasants armed with billhooks and clubs invaded the estate of the marquis d'Avalos: they pulled down a farm building, took firewood, beat the forest guard, and then overwhelmed the gendarmes and the urban guards of Pollutri and Monteodorisio. The riot has names: Michelangelo Tarquinio, Giuseppe Menna known as Passaguai, Luigi Berarducci. Today the village is known for its ventricina, the pork sausage made hot with chilli.