Corfinio

During the Social War of 91-88 before Christ, when the peoples of Italy rose against Rome after being refused citizenship, this place became the capital of the Italic League and was renamed Italica. Here they minted a silver coin which on the main face carried the word Italia and a woman crowned with laurel, and on the other the sacrifice of a sow by figures in military dress, the sign of the confederate pact. Rome won; the city was renamed Valva, and from the tenth century the settlement that grew on the ruins took the name Pentima. It kept that name until 1928, when the village took back the name of Corfinio, in honour of the Italic capital.

The Roman theatre, built after the conquest in the first century before Christ, had a diameter of seventy-five metres and some four thousand seats; today the square keeps its elliptical plan, and the bastions at its corners serve as buttresses for the medieval houses. Near the basilica of San Pelino stand two Roman funerary monuments of the second century, built as towers with the burial chamber inside, which here they call murgini because in the dialect of Corfinio morgia means stone. The basilica rose on the tomb of San Pelino, bishop of Brindisi, and in the year 700 pope Sergius I named Panfilo bishop of Corfinio and Sulmona. In 1706 an earthquake shook the Peligna valley and destroyed much of the medieval village. And in the nineteenth century a man from here, the philologist Antonio De Nino, set out to bring back to light the ancient past of the place: he paid for excavation campaigns, and it was then that the two funerary monuments by San Pelino and the plan of the Roman amphitheatre under the square came out.