Villa Santa Maria

Villa Santa Maria is called the homeland of cooks, and it is not a recent turn of phrase: the tradition of the workshops where cooks were trained goes back to the thirteenth century, and for centuries whole dynasties of masters of the kitchen and of the hotel trade came out of here. In the fifteen hundreds Saint Francis Caracciolo was born here, who is held to be the patron of cooks, and his family kept the village for a long time: in 1559 baron Ferrante Caracciolo became its feudal lord, the Caracciolo built the castle and held the lordship without a break until feudalism was abolished. In the nineteen-sixties, so as not to let the trade fall away, a catering school was built, and in Palazzo Caracciolo they put the museum of the cook; in front of the museum stands a bronze statue of a cook and a waiter. The village's origins, according to the Chronicon Vulturnense, lie in the eighth century, when the Benedictines raised the church of Santa Maria in Basilica «iuxta Sangri fluvium sita», by the river Sangro.

But there is another thing this village did, and it has to do with the war years. Between 1940 and 1943 Villa Santa Maria was one of the Abruzzo comuni that the fascist authorities designated as a place of civil internment for the foreign Jewish refugees who were in Italy. Several families arrived there under forced domicile, twenty-seven people in all, one of the largest groups in the province of Chieti, and the internees made friends with the local people. When German troops arrived in 1943, the podestà Roberto Castracane flatly denied that there were still Jews in the village, though he knew that at least one family, the Steinbergs, was hidden with the Saccone family. As soon as the Germans left, a month later, the Steinbergs were guided across the lines to the Allies, and so it went for all the other former internees. On the sixteenth of April 1978 the Yad Vashem institute of Jerusalem gave Roberto Castracane the title of Righteous Among the Nations.