Villa Santa Lucia degli Abruzzi

This village was born three times. First as an Italic outpost, when these heights depended on Aufinum, the Vestine town near which the Warrior of Capestrano was buried. Then between 775 and 800, when Aceprando, a former Lombard warrior of King Desiderius, reached the spring of Villocchera with other rebels and stopped there. Finally around the year one thousand, when that cluster of houses had grown enough to be called Villa and to take the name of the saint of Syracuse: the church of Santa Lucia is mentioned in a papal bull of 1112.

Unlike the villages round about, this one never had walls: its medieval layout is that of an open settlement, leaning on the slope above the Tirino valley. The comune, by contrast, is recent, for until 1910 this was a hamlet of Ofena. Then emigration carried the people away, to the United States and Canada, and today more than half of those who remain are over sixty-five: it is one of the highest shares of elderly people in Italy.