Cagnano Amiterno

The name is attested in the tenth century as campo de Caniano and it is a prediale: it comes from a (fundus) Canianus, the estate of one Canius, a late-Roman personal name. The second part is far younger and alludes to the Sabine-Roman city of Amiternum: it was added in the eighteen hundreds. It is the same operation performed on Torricella Peligna and Lama dei Peligni, where the nineteenth century handed out the names of ancient peoples; here, though, the reference has some ground under it, because Cagnano was the seat of the old bishopric of Amiterno. And there is another trace, in the name of a hamlet: Sala, which suggests a Lombard settlement. The comune covers some sixty square kilometres in the upper Aterno valley, surrounded by the mountains of the Alto Aterno, and it is one of the north-western doors of the Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga national park.

What gives the orders here is the cold. The climate is continental, with wide swings between day and night, and at night the phenomenon of thermal inversion occurs between the valley floor and the mountain belt: the cold air comes down and stays there. On the plain of Cascina, under the northern side of Monte Calvo and Monte Giano, the winter minima run to double figures below zero and reach twenty degrees below, above all when there is snow on the ground. Autumn is the rainiest season, summer the dry one. The churches too carry the marks of what has happened: San Rocco was rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1703, Santi Cosma e Damiano, of the fourteen hundreds, was remodelled in 1706, and only Maria Santissima della Natività keeps its medieval structure, a Latin cross with three naves. Getting here, once, was quicker: until 1935 there was the L'Aquila-Capitignano railway, with a halt that carried the village's name.