Torricella Peligna

The name of this village says something that is wrong, and the source writes it without beating about the bush. Torricella stands on the eastern side of the Maiella, between the Sangro and the Aventino, and in antiquity the people here were the Carricini, a Samnite tribe whose chief town was Juvanum; the Peligni were on the other side, over towards Campo di Giove, and the Frentani from Guardiagrele as far as Lanciano. The second name, that Peligna, was added with the unification of Italy in 1863, and the same mistake is carried by Taranta Peligna and Lama dei Peligni too. Local tradition has the village born of an exodus of refugees from Juvanum during the Byzantine wars of the sixth century, but the first certain notices are of the twelfth. That people lived here long before is told by the things that have been found: a tomb in the Sant'Antonio district with a bronze helmet, a dagger, a collar, a spiral bracelet, four rings and an iron buckle; a stone dagger from Monte Moresco attributed to the second millennium before Christ, now in the Pigorini museum in Rome; and, hidden in the cellar of a farmhouse at Santa Lucia, an Ostrogothic helmet of banded gilded copper and iron.

In 1550 a body was buried in the church of San Giacomo. It mummified by itself, and when they found it in 1989 during the restoration of the church people cried miracle: someone thought it might be the body of Saint James the Apostle. The church is the old baronial chapel, of 1173, rebuilt in the eighteen hundreds. The castle, on the other hand, covered the whole upper part of the village, and it is gone: the Germans, retreating on the Gustav line, put the headquarters of their operations inside it and then blew it up, and of the village they made scorched earth; in 1944 the Maiella brigade fought them here, in the battle of the Sangro. Where the castle stood there is now the obelisk to the civilian victims of the war. And one small thing that travelled far: in 1744 there was born at Torricella Vincenzo Tobia Nicola Bellini, grandfather and first teacher of the Vincenzo Bellini of the operas.