Torrevecchia Teatina

The name is a tower: in fourteenth-century documents the place is Castri Turris and Turris Theatina. In 1505 the fief belonged to the Valignani brothers, and in 1743 Federico Valignani, marquis and lord of Cepagatti, chose to build a palace right in the centre of the village as a summer residence, on the model of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli. He did so against his family's wishes, because that ground had once served for plague victims — which is also why San Rocco is venerated here. For a time the village was called Villa Valignani.

Beside the palace stood a small chapel built over an ancient Italic temple: the statuettes found on the spot are now in the La Civitella museum at Chieti. The comune, by contrast, is a nineteenth-century construction: in 1809 Torrevecchia was made a comune by joining the two settlements of Castelferrato and Torremontanara. At Torremontanara itself the church of San Pasquale Baylon was built in the nineteenth century after some local farmers found an image of the saint near the river Alento. Today the town is the seat of the Leonardo da Vinci online university.