San Demetrio ne' Vestini

San Demetrio was not one village but seven: Cavantoni, Cardamone, Cardabello, Colle, Collarano, Villagrande and Villa San Giovanni, scattered through the low valley of the Aterno. The name appears in the tenth century in the Chronicon Farfense, and before that the place was called Pagus chrementes, then Demetra. The seven villages had grown over the ancient pagi of the Vestini, whose polygonal walls remain, and they were linked by a sacred way that is used today as a way of the cross. At the head of that way stood a chapel said to have been built over a temple of Ceres, the goddess the Vestini worshipped. In a report of the twenty-eighth of March 1600 a notary asked the bishop of L'Aquila to rebuild it, because it was too small to hold the faithful of all seven villages. Under the plaster of the north wall of the church that replaced it there are a Roman tombstone and a carved tile with a hand, its thumb held out.

In 1254 a castle of this territory, Sinizzo, now vanished, was one of the founding castles of L'Aquila. In 1423 Braccio da Montone occupied the village — only the nearby castle of Stiffe held out against the siege — and in 1442 Alfonso of Aragon stayed here, having come to settle a boundary quarrel between the village and L'Aquila. In 1691 the community asked the kingdom to establish a public market every Friday, and the Friday market is still held. On the fifth of July 1862, by then in the Kingdom of Italy, the village added ne' Vestini to its name, both to tell itself apart from another San Demetrio in Calabria and to name the ancient people who had lived here. Then, on the sixth of April 2009, the earthquake killed three people, brought down the façade of the parish church and the bell tower of San Giovanni, and wrecked the lake of Sinizzo.