Notaresco

Notaresco has 6,863 inhabitants in a medieval village perched on a hill in the Teramo country, with thick walls and tall narrow windows; from the fourteenth century to 1757 it belonged to the Acquaviva, dukes of Atri, and their palace is the town hall today. Going down towards the Vomano, instead, stands the church of San Clemente, Romanesque and outwardly plain, which belonged to a Benedictine abbey founded in the ninth century and holds a ciborium reckoned among the oldest and most monumental in Abruzzo.

Then there are two more recent stories. The first is that of Giuseppe Devincenzi, born here in 1814, who was a senator and a minister of the young kingdom of Italy but above all a stubborn agronomist: he was among the first in Italy to plough with machines, planted the first specialised vineyards and patented equipment for working grapes, a destemmer and a counterweight hoist, which can still be seen in his old cellar. The second belongs to 1940, when the Fascist regime opened an internment camp at Notaresco inside two houses in the village, for foreign and stateless Jewish citizens and later for Dalmatian and Istrian partisans as well; it was closed in June 1944.