Torino di Sangro

The origins of the name are uncertain; the best-known legend tells that the people of Civita di Sangro, attacked by the Saracens in the ninth century, fled preceded by a bull that stopped beneath an old tower, where they took shelter and founded a new village. Traces of that tower are on the rocky spur to the north, towards the sea; it was cylindrical and was still standing in the nineteen-fifties, when it was heavily altered. The old borgo was entered through the porta Marina and the porta di Mezzo, and there were once eighteen churches: four remain, the oldest of them San Salvatore, of 1302. In the Middle Ages the village belonged to the abbey of Santo Stefano in Rivomaris, and after the Turks destroyed the abbey it became a fief of the D'Avalos and then of the Carafa, until 1806.

In 1862, after unification, the town council added the name of the river to its own, to avoid confusion in the post with the city that was then the capital of Italy. In the war the Germans occupied the village but did not destroy it: they were busy blowing up the bridges over the Sangro, and in the first days of November 1943 the Indian troops of Montgomery's army took the territory without difficulty. The Sangro River War Cemetery was built here in 1946, together with the Canadian one at Ortona, for the dead of the battle of the Sangro on the Gustav Line: white headstones all alike, in equal rows, one stretch curving into a semicircle, a mausoleum for those without a name, and among the buried, soldiers of sixteen or seventeen. Between the river mouth and the coast lie a hundred and eighty hectares of holm-oak wood grown on Pliocene sand: it is the only place in Abruzzo where the land tortoise lives and breeds.