Massa d'Albe

Massa d'Albe was born in the fourteenth century, when the inhabitants of Alba Fucens left the ancient Roman city and went up the hill. The Roman colony is still there, a few kilometres from the village: a Belgian archaeological expedition dug it, and what came out of it is today in the archaeological museum of Chieti, while the drawings of the excavations are in Rome. Outside the walls of Alba Fucens you can follow the remains of a Roman aqueduct that brought the water down from a spring at more than a thousand metres. On the hill of San Nicola, which overlooks the site, stood Albe, and above Albe the castle: Charles of Anjou destroyed village and stronghold after the battle of Tagliacozzo, to punish the inhabitants for having taken the Ghibelline side, and the Orsini, judging the place still strategic, rebuilt the castle.

The Marsica earthquake, in 1915, destroyed Albe completely, and Albe was rebuilt lower down, next to the ruins; it also destroyed Massa and Corona, two villages distinct until then, which were rebuilt together — and that is the town of today. The castle came out of it a ruin as well. In the second world war it went back to doing what it had done: the SS put a command post at Massa and used the broken castle as a position on the Gustav line, and for that reason partisan activity here was intense. On the twelfth of May 1944 the bombs of the flying fortresses killed forty-one people. And in 1830 four of the comune's hamlets asked to pass to Avezzano and were refused: they got it more than a century later, one at a time.