Civitella Casanova

Civitella claims to have invented the arrosticini, and unlike most claims of that kind hers comes with papers: in the town hall are kept the first licences for the sale of arrosticini, and they date from 1819 — licences that neither the immediately neighbouring comuni have, nor the rest of the province, nor the provinces around. That is why the village calls itself the one that invented arrosticini. Its name, on the other hand, comes from something quite different: from Casanova, the most important of the five Cistercian abbeys founded in this region, which today is a ruin.

The oldest part of the village is called Terravecchia and stands on a rocky height; in Roman times the place was called Cutina, or else Cingilia, and nobody knows which — whether the name changed, whether one belonged to the height and the other to the rest of the settlement, or whether they were two names for the same thing. On that height stood a castle of the Rossi, which an earthquake destroyed in 1456, and the church of San Marco, of which exactly one stone survives: a house has been built over it, and the owners deliberately left that stone in view. Then a landslide swallowed a good part of the rest, and the village had to grow the other way, westwards, along a single straight axis that people here say is one of the longest streets in the province. High up, on the plateau of the Voltigno, there is a small karst lake, the only one of its kind around that does not dry up in summer; and the belief is that it has no bottom, and that its water ends up in the Adriatic.