Lucoli

The name comes from the Latin luculus, the sacred grove, and woods there still are here in plenty, between monte Ocre and the plain of Campo Felice. The most important thing in the village is the abbey of San Giovanni Battista, whose origins go back to 1077: after the earthquake of 1703 the interior was redone in baroque, but the restorations, and above all the one of 1994, brought out again the frescoes attributed to Andrea De Litio along with the cloister and the portico. Inside there is also an organ built by Farina around 1500, which passes for the oldest in Abruzzo. The castle of Lucoli, for its part, took part in the founding of L'Aquila by building there the quarter of San Giovanni di Lucoli, and in the fourteenth century it backed that quarter when it rose against queen Joanna I.

The event that sets Lucoli apart, though, belongs to the twentieth century. By the royal decree of 29 July 1927 eight comuni around L'Aquila — Arischia, Bagno, Camarda, Lucoli, Paganica, Preturo, Roio and Sassa — were suppressed and annexed to the city, together with a hamlet of Pizzoli. Twenty years later, in 1947, Lucoli was the only one of the eight that managed to become an autonomous comune again: the other seven are still quarters and hamlets of L'Aquila. The town hall does not stand in the village that gives the comune its name but in the district of Collimento, and the houses are scattered through a dozen settlements along the valley. On 6 April 2009 the epicentre of the earthquake fell just beyond the north-eastern boundary, and yet the damage here was less than in the neighbouring villages: the shield, it seems, was the group of monte Ocre and monte Cagno.