San Benedetto in Perillis

The village grew up around a fortified Benedictine monastery, founded by the Lombards in the eighth century: it is one of the oldest abbeys in Abruzzo. In 1092 its last private owner, on his deathbed, gave it to the bishop of Valva together with all its lands. The village that gathered around it still has the elliptical shape of those days, with the watchtowers set into the wall.

Earthquakes have moved the village piece by piece: after the one of 1703 it began to slip down the valley, with the one of 1915 part of the upper village slid away and was abandoned, and in 2009 the houses already empty came down while the monastery had to be shored up. San Benedetto had been a hamlet of Collepietro since 1806, and got its municipality back only in 1947; the mother church was reopened for worship in 2025, after years of restoration.