Alanno

Alanno was born to stand guard over an abbey. The castle was built in the ninth century by Louis II above an existing village, as a fortress to defend the newly founded abbey of San Clemente a Casauria; in the twelfth century the castrum itself was given to that abbey by Lothair II, and that is how Alanno enters written history, inside the Chronicon Casauriense. From 1328 the village declined together with the abbey and passed from lord to lord, from the Camponeschi to the Caracciolo and then the Fieramosca.

Of the walls three towers remain: the cylindrical one on via XX Settembre, with its battered base and windows cut out of the old arrow slits, and the merloned one that answered it from the south. Outside the village, in contrada Oratorio, stands Santa Maria delle Grazie, born at the end of the fifteenth century (tradition says the Madonna asked the peasants for a country church), with its Renaissance portal, the lunette of the Deposition and apse frescoes attributed to the workshop of Andrea De Litio. The medieval parish church, on the other hand, was destroyed by the earthquake of 1915 and rebuilt.