Montefino

Until the nineteenth century this village was called Montesecco, Mons Siccus, the dry mountain, because the site had no springs; in 1862 it changed its name to Montefino, which is the name of the river that runs below it. The first medieval record is of the Norman age, around 1150: a castellum of the county of Penne, called precisely Mons Siccus, a fief of just sixty-five inhabitants, held by Trasmondo di Colle Madii on behalf of count Roberto di Aprutio. The castle is still partly there: it is the Castello di Corte, of which a round tower remains, crowned with round arches and roofed with tiles, tied to a knot of houses born out of the castle itself. In the thirteenth century it passed to the Angevins, in 1454 to the Acquaviva of Atri, who rebuilt the walls and raised a second stronghold, and by 1506 it appears as the bishops of Teramo's.

Between 1468 and 1478 the Albanian people fleeing the Ottomans poured onto this coast too, as far as the mouth of the Pescara, and the nearby village of Villa Bozza grew considerably. The proof lies in a document: on 30 June 1600 the Università of Atri, through three men of its Reggimento, made with the Schiavoni and the men of Villa Bozza a new pact to replace the one of 1475, which by then was damaged and in places unreadable with age, confirming Atri's feudal rights. The church of San Giacomo Apostolo carries in its wall a sixteenth-century portal recovered from an abbey abandoned nearby, and the village keeps the feast of Saint James on the twenty-fifth of July and, in the same month, holds its oil fair. In fifty years, between the census of 1951 and that of 2001, the people of Montefino were more than halved.