Bugnara

Where the name comes from nobody knows, but one of the hypotheses derives Bugnara from Bonae Ara, the altar of the goddess Bona, or Ceres; and that altar may still be there, because under the church of the Madonna della Neve there is a pagan temple with a floor in opus spicatum, and close by two stones were found concerning a priestess: one gives her name, Helvia, the other shows her performing the rite. Another reading makes it Vignae Ara, for the vineyards round about. The church above was built about the year one thousand and rebuilt in 1361, with three naves on gothic arches. And at Santo Stefano, where as early as 1887 Antonio De Nino had described a settlement with a wine cellar, the excavations of 1980 and 1981 brought to light walls in opus incertum, columns, amphorae, floors in opus spicatum and seven dolia: a Roman farm villa.

In 1079 the borgo became the fief of Simone di Sangro, and with that family it stayed until the line died out, in 1759, with Vittoria Mariconda di Sangro: nearly seven hundred years. It was they who built, in the eleventh century, the ducal palace also called the Rocca dello Scorpione, ringed with walls, and it is still the building the village gathers around. In 1442 the Regia Dogana della Mena delle Pecore of Foggia was set up, and Bugnara, which lived on pasture, did handsomely out of it. The earthquakes are the other constant: 1706, 1933, 1984, and then the night of 6 April 2009, when this village, some sixty-five kilometres in a straight line from the epicentre, saw centuries-old houses come down and five hundred square metres of the ducal palace's floors, which the 1984 quake had already weakened.