Scoppito

The village has moved three times, and each of its sites still carries a name. The Sabines founded it where the contrada Vigliano now is; then part of the people went over to Amiternum, whose theatre, Roman amphitheatre and house of the gladiators lie within this comune; in Roman times the village settled at Foruli, today the contrada Civitatomassa; and in the Middle Ages the borgo was built from nothing, with walls. The earthquakes of 1461 and 1703 shook it, and the one of 1703 can still be seen on the abbey of San Bartolomeo: the church is fortified, with side bastions, but its front is plain, because it was rebuilt with whatever material was at hand.

On the twenty-fifth of March 1954, between Civitatomassa and Madonna della Strada, workers levelling a small clay rise brought out the skeleton of a Mammuthus meridionalis: it is now in the National Museum of Abruzzo, in the eastern bastion of the castle of L'Aquila. The coat of arms is the one the Statutes describe: three golden ears of wheat on blue, the gold for the prosperity of the grain and the blue for the clearness of the sky. After the earthquake of 2009 part of the population lived for years in temporary housing modules, and a group of new houses was built at contrada San Bartolomeo. The comune, which borders Lazio for a third of its perimeter, has thirteen hamlets and, along the state road, the plants of the L'Aquila pharmaceutical cluster.