Canistro

The name most probably comes from the canistri, that is from the canestri: the wicker baskets that were woven here and left from here. There is, though, also a legend that ties it to a kennel that is said to have stood on the hill where the village was born, and the coat of arms took precisely that one seriously: on a red field a black dog rampant, with a collar, chained to a silver column crowned in the antique manner — the column is the Colonna family, who arrived in 1497 when Canistro entered the duchy of Tagliacozzo. The old village, Canistro Superiore, stands high above the Roveto valley and in the middle ages was called Castro Canistri; it appears for the first time in the Catalogus baronum, the list of fiefs the Normans had drawn up. From Civitella Roveto, of which it was part, Canistro separated by a decree of 8 October 1851.

Then came two disasters, and neither of them happened by chance. On 6 December 1907, at Monongah in West Virginia, the mine blew up in the worst mining disaster in the history of the United States: among the dead were workers who had left from here, and at the end of 2007, for the centenary, the village raised a monument to them. Eight years after the mine came the Marsica earthquake: in 1915 Canistro counted eighty victims, and sixty-four of them died inside the parish church. The village was rebuilt by moving downhill, to the Casali di Santa Croce, near the main road, and the town hall went there too — not without resistance from those who did not want to leave the heights. Today at Canistro Superiore, beside the fountains and the washing troughs, stand the statues dedicated to the Marsican bear Amarena and her cubs.