Tornareccio

Above the village stands Monte Pallano, and people were already up there in the Palaeolithic, as the flints gathered on its slopes attest; later the fortified citadel of Pallanum rose on it, of which the perimeter walls and three gateways remain. The name of the village, on the other hand, appears for the first time in a document of the twenty-second of June 829, when the area passed to the abbey of Farfa: the charter speaks of a small monastery dedicated to Saint Stephen in the place called Lucania, a monastery of which absolutely nothing remains today except the papers themselves, which nevertheless show it holding, around the year one thousand, fiefs scattered between the Sinello, the Osento and the Sangro. The castle came later: it was begun around 1118, and the one who says so is the monk Gregorio di Catino, who notes in the Chronicon farfense that in the county of Chieti there are the monastery of Saint Stephen in Lucania and the castle of Tornareccio. In the old town two of its round towers can still be seen, propped about by the houses that over the centuries have half swallowed them.

In 1943, lying close to the Gustav line on the Sangro, the village was occupied by the Germans, and on the fourteenth of November part of it was destroyed by scorched-earth tactics: the houses mined and blown up one by one, the people forced to climb Monte Pallano, that is, to go back inside the walls of the Italic citadel. The core around the parish church of Santa Vittoria was saved by a single gesture: Vincenzo Lemme defused the fuse of the dynamite laid under palazzo Melocchi. When the Allies arrived the people came back down, rebuilt, and in the post-war years chose a trade: beekeeping. Since then Tornareccio has lived on honey and exports it, and is one of the thirty-nine Italian comuni gathered in the association of the Cities of Honey.