Introdacqua

The name says where it stands: Interaquas, the town built between the waters, for the quantity of water that came down these valleys. The first two times Introdacqua appears in a document, however, the subject is not water but stolen land. The oldest is of 983 and is a judicatum, that is a sentence, issued against one Anso son of Teuderamus and a Ferualdus son of Oderisius, who had usurped lands belonging to the monastery of San Clemente a Casauria; the second is of 1024, and is another sentence of the same kind, except that this time the usurpers are ten. A town whose existence is proved by two trials for occupying other people's fields. The first settlement, pre-Roman, stood high up, near the summit of Monte Plaja, in a place still called Piano della Civitella; in the Middle Ages the people came down to where the town is now, and it was the monks of Casauria who brought these lands under cultivation.

Under the counts Di Sangro, who held the fief for more than half a century from 1173, Introdacqua counted forty-eight hearths, that is forty-eight families: perhaps two hundred and forty people. The population grew little, but the churches inside and outside the settlement were many. Then came the d'Aquino, who according to the source did not oppress their subjects with the exactions adopted by other feudal lords and collected only the tithe. With them, around 1379, came to take refuge Giovanni Quatrario, humanist and poet of Sulmona, raised in the school of a familiar of Petrarch, fleeing the riots that had broken out between the noble families of his city: he shut himself in the castle of Introdacqua, and later, from Rome, thanked count Francesco d'Aquino by dedicating a poem to him. In the town the Jewish quarter can still be made out, with its synagogues, dating from the sixteenth century.