Basciano

Across the municipal coat of arms walks a bearded, armed man, seen in profile, in orientalising dress with a crescent moon behind him: he is a Saracen, and the blazon belongs to the class of «canting» arms, those in which the figure explains the name of the town. The trouble is that it explains a name that means something else. Basciano is attested in the eighth century as in Bassiano and is a predial toponym: the estate of a Roman called Bassius. The Saracens have nothing to do with it — their temporary occupation of the Adriatic coasts is certain, but for the hinterland there are no historical or archaeological attestations. The source is blunt: the arrival of the Arabs at Basciano seems to be only a popular legend, born of the community's wish to trace the origin of its own name to an older history and, perhaps for that reason, one felt to be nobler. Hence the readings of the toponym as coming from the Arabic «pasha», or from the Bascianii, said to have been the hostages taken during Moorish raids. And the legend can still be read today in tourist guides.

The documents say something else. The first historical notice is of 787, when Basciano appears as Bassano in a list of goods ceded by Charlemagne to the monastery of Montecassino; around the year one thousand it belongs to the bishop of Teramo, and from the thirteenth century to the Acquaviva of Atri, who kept it in their barony until 1538. The fiscal registers of the Kingdom of Naples count the hearths taxed here between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the figures swing widely: they almost double in thirteen years, then fall, then rise again, then drop by nearly half. In 1843 Basciano was one of the first villages in the province to have a Monte pecuniario, a fund that lent money to farmers at six per cent a year. And in the great agrarian inquiry of the late nineteenth century the official sent to describe it noted two things: the only high-forest wood in the whole district of Penne, and a countryside planted with a single vine, the Montonico, trained on canes tied with rushes.