Lettomanoppello

In medieval documents the place is Terra Lecti Prope Manoppellum, the land of Letto near Manoppello, and for a long time its history was that of the county of Manoppello. What it has always had is stone, and what lies beneath it. A block of bitumen stamped in the first century after Christ, found in contrada Pignatara, shows that these deposits were already being worked in Roman times; and between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Republic of Amalfi came here for the bitumen it needed for its ships — coins of Amalfi have been found in the ruined church of Santa Liberata. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth a German firm turned the asphalt mines into an industrial concern, among the best equipped in the Kingdom; extraction stopped in the nineteen-thirties.

Then the men went to dig elsewhere. After the war many young men from here left for Wallonia, in Belgium, which was then the most important coal basin in Europe; on the eighth of August 1956, in the fire at the Bois du Cazier mine at Marcinelle, two hundred and sixty-two people of twelve nationalities died, a hundred and thirty-six of them Italian and six from Lettomanoppello. A monument in front of the town theatre remembers them. At the end of the fifties other young workers from the village went to build the Vajont dam. At home the trade was the stone of the Maiella, cut by hand: with it the shepherds raised tholos, round dry-stone huts, and the plain where most of them stand is called the Piana delle Cappelle.