Pizzoli

Pizzoli was one of the castles of the Aquila contado and took part in the founding of the city in 1254, building its own church of San Lorenzo there. That relationship ended up costing it a piece of itself: the Greater Aquila decree of 1927 annexed to the city eight whole comuni and, on top of them, Pizzoli's own frazione of San Vittorino. Of those eight only one managed to become autonomous again, Lucoli, and it took twenty years: not until 1947. Above the village stands the Dragonetti de Torres castle, built in the seventeenth century over the thirteenth-century fortress, of which a corner tower remains.

The ground moves here: in 1703 the great earthquake that also destroyed L'Aquila razed almost the whole village, and in 2009 Pizzoli was the epicentre of one of the strongest shocks, on the same day as the main one. Between 1940 and 1943 the comune was designated by the fascist authorities as a place of civil internment for foreign Jewish refugees: there were twenty internees, one of the largest groups in the province. After the eighth of September, when the Germans arrived, every one of them managed to escape capture and deportation.