Sante Marie

In 1861, at the height of the post-unification brigandage, the Catalan general José Borjes passed through here; he had been an ally of the brigand Carmine Crocco and, that alliance broken, was trying to reach Francis II with eleven soldiers still loyal to the Bourbons. For his escape he used a guide from Sante Marie, who however, as soon as he could, warned the village's national guard that the general was at the Mastroddi farmstead, in the Luppa valley. The national guard of Sante Marie took part in the assault together with the Piedmontese: Borjes and his men were captured, taken to Tagliacozzo and shot. The bodies were burned, except that of the general, which was handed over to the French embassy and for which a funeral was held in the church of the Gesù in Rome.

The most interesting part, though, comes afterwards. More than a century later the comune had a stone placed at the spot of the capture, in memory of commander Enrico Franchini, of his soldiers and of the national guards of Sante Marie «trusting in the Unity of Italy». That stone was removed and replaced, by a monarchist and Bourbon association, with another one hailing the martyrdom of general Borjes and topped by the Bourbon flag; and every year, at the Mastroddi farmstead, the same association commemorates the episode in a revisionist key. The same field, two opposite monuments. For the rest Sante Marie is a mountain village whose name comes from Altum castrum Sanctae Mariae, the high place where a temple dedicated to the Virgin stood, and it appears in the Catalogus baronum of 1187 and in a bull of Clement III of the following year. It belonged to the Orsini and then to the Colonna until 1806; it knew the famine of 1764 and the drought of 1779; and with the Saint-Cloud edict it stopped burying its dead in the ossuary of the church of San Nicola. In July 1888 the railway to Pescara arrived, with the tunnel of monte Bove almost six kilometres long, and the spoil from the digging was used to make the embankment towards Poggetello. Of the Marsica earthquake of 13 January 1915, here, nothing was known until the late afternoon: the shock had knocked out communications for hours. And on 20 January 1944, around ten in the morning, twelve American fighter-bombers attacked the old centre, which was then full of people evacuated from Avezzano: nobody took cover, because until that day the planes had always been passing over on their way to bomb somewhere else.