Canzano

The story told here for ever is that of a man who was not believed. On the eighteenth of May 1480 the peasant Giovanni Floro was ploughing just outside the village when he noticed that his oxen kept trying to kneel; he looked up and saw the Virgin on the top of an alder, asking him to have a church built at the Piano del Castellano. Floro ran into the village to report it and was laughed at, so he went back to the fields. The next day the Virgin repeated her request; he told her sadly that nobody believed him, and she vanished without answering. She reappeared on the twentieth of May with a practical solution: that Floro should have himself given a notoriously untameable horse, belonging to the de Montibus family, and let the animal lead him wherever it went. The owner agreed, the peasant climbed into the saddle to general astonishment, and the horse, unbridled and unguided, reached the Piano del Castellano, circled a certain space three times and knelt, lowering its head to the ground. Those present, who had watched in silence, erupted, and the church began to rise that very day; the present building, now the parish church, was raised in 1592 by the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary, which had the date written on the architrave of the doorway.

Canzano is ancient in any case: the hill sits on the ridge dividing the Vomano from the Tordino, the Praetutian people probably had a fortified seat here, and not far off a necropolis dug at the end of the nineteen-twenties was in use between the ninth and the fourth century before Christ. The name appears in the Catalogus Baronum of 1150, after which the village was a fief of the Acquaviva, of a family called da Canzano and finally of the Alarcón y Mendoza. Outside the built-up area the Romanesque abbey of San Salvatore still stands, keeping a cycle of fourteenth-century frescoes attributed to the Master of Offida. Today the village is known across the region for two things as far apart as can be, lace and turkey in the Canzano manner. And for a third, less welcome: on the evening of the eighth of September 1951 two shocks in quick succession had their epicentre right here.