Poggio Picenze

Under this village there is white stone for sculpture, and much of its history comes from that: the master stonecutters of Poggio have drawn from it hundreds of doorways, balconies, fountains and eagles, and the village itself is full of what they made. It is a stone easy to work, and it has a quality that suits the trade: with the years it hardens and takes on a golden patina. The name, on the other hand, comes from further back, from a garrison of the Piceni on monte Picenze, in the third century before Christ. Today's village was born around the twelfth century, in the time of the incastellamento, and a document of 1173 already calls it Podium de Picentia; in 1254 it took part with other castles in the founding of L'Aquila, taking a share of the quarter of Santa Maria, where the church of Santa Maria di Picenze still stands.

Loyalty to L'Aquila cost it dear: in 1423, during the Angevin-Aragonese war of succession, Braccio da Montone attacked Poggio along with the other castles of the contado, and the stronghold came out of it badly compromised. It was never fully repaired: by 1832 the castle had no owners left and was in such a state as to threaten collapse, so the palace part was pulled down to build new houses with, and what remains is the elliptical ring of walls with the stump of the tower, which is visited for the view. The earthquakes did the rest. After the one of 6 October 1762 the village had to be largely rebuilt, and the parish church of San Felice Martire was raised again in the imposing baroque it still shows. And on 6 April 2009 Poggio Picenze was among the comuni worst struck: the two historic quarters, that of the Castello and that of via Umberto I, were made unusable, and five people died under the collapses, three of them not yet of age. That same year the people of Sambucetole, a village in Umbria, gave to Poggio Picenze the proceeds of their threshing festival; via Umberto I was reopened to traffic only in March 2012.