Collepietro

The name first appears in 1092, in a deed by which a lord of Frankish descent hands a monastery over to the diocese of Valva and lists, among its attached properties, some holdings in the castle of Collepietro. The village stands in a gateway position, between the Tirino valley and the Navelli plateau, at the mouth of the roads to the Maiella and to Campo Imperatore. From it a dynasty took its name, the Di Collepietro, and from that branched off the Di Pagliara: to them belonged Gualtiero, grand chancellor of the Kingdom of Sicily in the years when Frederick II was still a child.

The castle was destroyed by Braccio da Montone, as at neighbouring Caporciano, and as there what was left of it served to build a church: San Giovanni Battista rose right beside the fortress. It has twin bell towers, but only one is its own, because the other is the civic tower, and the Baroque front hides a Romanesque doorway of the thirteenth century. Outside the village, on the drove road, stands a fifteenth-century church fortified with three buttresses on each side. Since 1947 the hamlet of San Benedetto in Perillis has left to be a comune of its own.