Collecorvino

Collecorvino has 5,908 inhabitants in the Vestina country, and its name is the name of a person: Corbino, son of the Lombard Alderamo, who in the first half of the ninth century settled on a hill, fortified it and made it productive. The place became the hill of Corbino. The oldest form of the name, res Corbini, is documented in 853, and in that very year Corbino sold his lands to Louis II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire: the name of a private landowner has outlived him, the buyer and the empire.

On the hill opposite stands the convent of San Patrignano, founded by the Benedictines in 854 and then passed from order to order, to the Franciscans, the Augustinians, the Friars Minor. In the seventeenth century it became a centre of herbal medicine, and it still keeps its sixteenth-century cloister, the frescoes with the lives of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony, and the central well, where the maidenhair fern still grows, the plant the friars used for diseases of the chest. The friars left in 1968 and the building stood abandoned for decades; the restoration had only just begun when the L'Aquila earthquake of 2009 damaged it again. The same earthquake cut short the spire of one of the two bell towers of the parish church, and it has stayed that way.