Cermignano

Cermignano was born in the thirteenth century, when a few families came down from Montegualtieri, which is in fact a tower. Before, it was called only Mons, the mount, and around 1170 it became Monte Gualtiero: the papers do not say for what event. The one Gualtiero they offer turns up seventy years later, in 1239, when Frederick II shared out among the seventy-six barons of the Medio Vomano valley one prisoner of the Lombard League each, and among those prisoners there is a Gualtiero del Monte: the tower is attributed to him for a pure coincidence of name, and the coincidence comes late. The place itself is documented much earlier, among the goods of an abbey and in the confirmations of emperors, and the village below stayed with the De Sterlich barons until the unification.

Between 1940 and 1943 the fascist authorities designated Cermignano as a place of civil internment, and about ten foreign Jewish refugees were sent to live here. After 8 September 1943, with German troops in the region, every one of them managed to avoid capture and deportation, and they were still here when the liberation came, in June 1944. The village emptied by another road: after the war the land was no longer enough, and people left for the north, for Rome and for abroad. There remain the church of Santa Lucia, from the end of the seventeen hundreds, and in via Roma a palace put up in what the sources call «vago stile palladiano», a vague Palladian manner.