San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore

The village has the longest name in Italy, and it built it onto itself in two stages. The first piece is ancient: the castle appears in the historical citations of 1040 as Castel della Pietra, and the saint came afterwards, with the martyrdom of the churchmen Valentino and Damiano in a hamlet not far off and with the translation of their remains from Terracina. The second piece is administrative, and concerns something that no longer exists: Frederick the Second had created the Giustizierato of Abruzzo, later divided in two, and the part south of Chieti was called Abruzzo Citeriore. When the Kingdom of Italy came into being in 1863 the village took that name as an inheritance too, and so became, with thirty letters, the Italian comune with the longest denomination: which, the chronicles say, caused a certain amount of difficulty at the post office. In 1948, on the other hand, it lost a piece of itself, the hamlet of Scafa, which broke away and became an autonomous comune.

At the top of the built-up area stands the castle, founded by the Normans in the second half of the eleventh century: a circular plan, walls alternating with watchtowers, today half swallowed by the palace that came later. In 1583 it passed to Margaret of Austria, who had it restored, and since then it has been called palazzo Farnese. Earlier still, in 1423, the village had been destroyed by Braccio da Montone on his march towards L'Aquila. Today two things pull the place in opposite directions. On Good Friday the procession goes out with the two thieves hooded and barefoot, re-enacting the death of Christ, and on the seventeenth of January, for Saint Anthony the Abbot, the temptations of the devil are staged in music and then the local produce is auctioned off. At the edge of the village, instead, in an eighteenth-century palace, a museum opened in 2004 keeps fossils of Abruzzo reaching back five hundred million years, and a whole room of ambers.