Caramanico Terme

The name comes from the Lombards and means, roughly, men in arms: a settlement of armed people, set where the rivers Orta and Orfento meet, on the north-western slopes of the Majella. The other thing the village is known for appears instead in a medieval chronicle, the Chronicon Casauriense, under the description «putrid waters»: it is the first reference to the sulphurous springs of the area, and whoever christened them so was clearly going by the smell. Meanwhile the village followed the fortunes of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as a fief of the d'Aquino, took the earthquake of 1706 and rebuilt its palaces; the thermal establishment came in 1901, and only in 1960 did the comune add Terme to its name, to tell itself apart from the namesakes scattered around Italy. The castle, on the other hand, is gone: damaged by the earthquake of 1933, it was demolished during the fascist twenty years, and today its foundations remain. In the Second World War Caramanico found itself on the German side of the Gustav line.

Outside the built-up area, towards the boundary with Salle, stands a Romanesque church dedicated to Thomas Becket, raised over a pieve already mentioned in the ninth century. It has three naves and three different floor levels, a small crypt with a well of spring water, and on the front four half-columns that are the remnant of a portico never built. On the architrave of the central doorway sits a high relief of the twelve apostles with Christ enthroned, of unusual quality for its time, with the year 1118 written below. Inside, among the composite columns and the square ones, there is a slender monolithic one with a Corinthian capital that they call the holy column: the faithful used to break fragments off it, crediting them with healing powers. The whole municipal territory lies within the Majella national park, and the Orfento valley was a protected area even before the park; at the top, where the Sfischia waterfall gives rise to the stream, the reserve is integral and no one goes in.