Raiano

Raiano moved. The first settlement, the Castrum Radiani, stood on the hill of Castellone and appears in the documents in 872; in the tenth century it briefly hosted the emperors Otto the First and Otto the Third. Earthquakes emptied it in the second half of the fifteenth century — one of those shocks formed the lake known as Quaglia — and the inhabitants came down to the valley, to the exact point where the Celano-Foggia drove road parts from the consular way. Thus was born Raiano Vecchio, today the Sant'Antonio quarter, where the alleys are narrow because the houses are entered by external stairs, the bajitte. Of the old castle only the clock tower survives.

In the twentieth century the village became an address of Italian culture: Benedetto Croce used to stay at palazzo Sagaria Rossi, and with him Cesare De Lollis, Antonio Anile and the publisher Giovanni Laterza, who wrote that the history of the Scrittori italiani was bound to Raiano and to that house. Croce also counted the village's people in the archives: about eight hundred in 1532, sixteen hundred in 1648. In the church of the Madonna delle Grazie an inscription records the solar eclipse of the ninth of April 1567, and in the gorges of the Aterno stands the hermitage of San Venanzio, reached by a bridge-loggia over the river, with a holy staircase cut into the rock.