Tocco da Casauria

The name of this village was decided against the vote of its own council. After unification it had to be distinguished from another Tocco, in the province of Benevento; in the session of the twenty-sixth of November 1862 the councillors debated and approved Tocco di Abruzzo by six votes to one, keeping Tocco Tremonti as an alternative. The final decision, however, was left to the prefect, who chose Tocco Casauria, for the historical traditions of the famous nearby temple of Casauria. That abbey, San Clemente a Casauria, had named the village long before: the Chronicon Casauriense records Tocco in 872 as one of its courts.

Here, in 1863, oil extraction began with a mechanical drilling rig: it is the first case in Italy. A few years later, in 1870, Palazzo Toro was completed, intended for the production of Centerbe, the herb liqueur of the Maiella. There are then two smaller stories that say a great deal: in 1848 the peasants prepared a rising for the twentieth of March, the patron's day, but nothing came of it because the authorities had been warned in advance by a local poet, Domenico Stromei; and the Dominican convent, handed to the municipality in 1814, served as the town hall until 2009, when the earthquake made it unusable.