Catignano

The oldest people here are Neolithic: from the nineteen-sixties onwards the digs at Ponte Rosso have brought to light a village of the sixth and fifth millennium before Christ, and the hollows left in the ground still tell how it was organised — huts, fire pits, small shafts for storage and burials. Along with them came pots of fine clay with impressed or painted decoration, household objects and a few small terracotta idols in human shape. Later those communities moved to the areas around today's village. Catignano probably rose on the ruins of ancient Cutina, which Livy names as one of the strongest and most stubborn towns of the Vestini: together with Cingilia it held out against the Roman army longer than the others, and for that it was completely destroyed, so that its traces were lost.

In the Middle Ages the name became Catenianum and Catigitanum, and both point back to the word for chain. The most evocative explanation makes it a place of deportation and imprisonment; the soberer one derives it from a land tax, because for centuries the size of fields was measured with the chain. The castle appears in 1090, when the bishopric of Penne ceded it to the abbey of Carpineto; a document of 964 already names land here with a small church, probably the one the Benedictines rebuilt and which is still standing, with its three apses. After a Ghibelline revolt the lord of the castle was imprisoned and Charles of Anjou confiscated his goods, and from then on the property was broken up among various lords. During the French invasion the village was a refuge for brigands, many of whom the French killed at Pianella in 1806. Of that period little is known, because in the first half of the eighteen hundreds a violent fire destroyed much of the town archive. From 1811 to 1817 Catignano was the seat of the justice of the peace for the district.