Picciano

The history of Picciano begins in 1049, when Bernardo, count of Penne, gave lands and buildings to found a Benedictine abbey: it is the first document in which the village appears. In the years that followed, between 1051 and 1063, the same count gave the monastery more than twenty churches, mills on the river Fino, bells and fiefs — and the donations included the people who lived on them, men, women and children. Of that world, though, what stays with you most is the way obligations were paid. The abbot of San Silvestro owed the abbot of Picciano, every year on the day of the Assumption, twenty-four pizzas and a pig. And in 1144 the abbot Berardo, temporarily ceding two fiefs to his brother Rainaldo, imposed on him visits, offerings and a lunch of bread, meat and wine to be served to the monks on Saint Giles' day. Money appears rarely in those papers: the accounts were kept in food.

The abbey of Santa Maria was also an instrument in the hands of the local lords, who made use of it in their own quarrels — the charta convenientiae records the protests of the abbot Alberico, who in 1110 nonetheless managed to have himself elected abbot of San Clemente a Casauria, that is, to move to where things were really decided. There were exchanges upon exchanges: in 1084 castles and churches towards Elice in return for the church of San Panfilo at Spoltore, in 1122 further swaps, and in 1170 king Roger II confirmed the monastery's privileges. In 1517 a privilege of Charles V passed it to the Olivetans of L'Aquila; then the abbey burned and Picciano lost its weight. The medieval concessions, however, did not end there: until 1945 the farmers and stockbreeders here were bound to pay the parish an annual fee called the livello, a form of emphyteusis descending from the concessions of the counts of Penne. At the end of the nineteenth century the village rose again with tailoring, shoemaking and a kiln that gave work to the neighbouring towns too. And the feast of the Assumption is still celebrated, but in the hamlet of Piccianello, while the church dedicated to it stands in the centre of Picciano.