Cellino Attanasio

Cellino stands on the watershed between the valley of the Vomano and that of the Piomba, and more than seventy per cent of its inhabitants still live scattered in isolated houses or small clusters: it is the legacy of sharecropping, which shaped the landscape more than any planning scheme. The village belonged first to the Benedictines of San Giovanni in Venere, then to the Acquaviva dukes of Atri, who held it almost without interruption from the late fourteenth century until the family died out in the eighteenth, and who walled it with nine towers, of which two are still in good condition. It suffered an Angevin siege in 1462, repelled the attack of Ascanio Colonna in 1485, and saw the French republican army enter on the eighth of December 1798.

The mother church of Santa Maria La Nova is attested from 1330 and keeps a portal of 1424 by a Neapolitan master who also worked at Atri, a wooden tabernacle of 1583 by craftsmen from the Marche, an altarpiece by Andrea De Litio and, in the choir, the Renaissance funerary monument of Giovanni Battista Acquaviva, dead at fourteen in 1496. The bell tower belonged to the defensive system and was rebuilt in the fifteenth century on the model of the great towers of Teramo and Atri: an imitation which the sources themselves judge weaker than the originals. Outside the old gates two fountains survive, one of the fifteenth century and one of the eighteenth.