Villamagna

The name says what was here: a villa magna, that is a large farm, and in Roman times a Latin settlement really did stand on this spot. In 870 some Benedictine monks settled in the convent of San Severino, and in 1059 the castle of Villamagna with its pieve of San Michele appears among the possessions of the diocese of Chieti, in a bull of pope Nicholas the Second to the bishop of that city. A few decades later something less usual happens: in 1096 the Norman Drogone, brother of the count with whom he governed the Adriatic Abruzzo, gives back to the bishop of Chieti a series of possessions the bishopric had lost from the ninth century onwards — and among them is Villamagna. It is not the usual story of Normans taking: it is a story of Normans giving back.

Until 1566 the village suffered raids by the Turks, and the tale it drew from them is still alive: the patron saint, Santa Margherita, is said to have appeared on the walls and driven them off. The village re-enacts it every year in July, and in the mother church hangs the painting of the scene, Santa Margherita against the Turks, made in 1746 by Antonio Sarnelli: a legend with its own festival and its own picture. In 1461 Ferrante of Aragon gave Villamagna to the city of Chieti, and after that the village passed through a succession of lords. On the thirteenth of June 1944 the eighty-eighth American infantry division entered it. In the former church of San Francesco, now the municipal auditorium, the trussed ceiling still preserves some words taken from the Canticle of Brother Sun. And the red wine of Villamagna has had a denomination of its own since 2011.