Crognaleto

The name comes from dialect: crognale is the cornel tree. The village that gives the comune its name stands at eleven hundred metres, but the town hall is not there: it is further down, in the hamlet of Nerito, because Crognaleto is a scattered comune and has never had a single centre. It was made that way on purpose, after all. The comune was set up in 1813, during the Napoleonic occupation: Crognaleto, which until then belonged to the comune, or università, of Roseto, was declared autonomous together with the territory that would later become Cortino, and it took in as hamlets a good many settlements which until that moment had mostly been universitates themselves, each with an autonomy of its own. It is therefore a comune put together out of places that used to govern themselves, scattered over both sides of the Vomano valley, on the eastern slopes of the Monti della Laga, in thick woods of beech and oak. The first notices of this area are from the end of the twelve hundreds, and they are notices of a quarrel: nearby Amatrice claimed possession of some of these places.

Outside the built-up area stands the church of the Madonna della Tibia, and the name says exactly what happened. Bernardo Paolini, of Amatrice, lost his way, slipped into a ravine and came close to dying; he was so astonished at having broken only a shinbone that he had a church built. The present one, larger, was put up nearby in 1617, and beside it there was a house for pilgrims, now in ruins. At Nerito, at Christmas, they light a fire made of ten or twenty tonnes of wood, which burns from the night of the twenty-fourth of December until the morning of the sixth of January; at the start of summer, at Rocca Roseto, they hold the shepherding fair. And what is eaten is the ventricina: pork fat with a small part of shoulder or other lean meat, minced, seasoned with spices and chilli and stuffed into the animal's stomach or bladder, then matured with a light smoking, aged, and finally spread on bread. The local custom is to keep the sausages inside the ventricina, so that each improves the other. The arms of the comune were recognised in 1936.