Penna Sant'Andrea

In 1974, at Monte Giove, digs brought out an Italic necropolis in use from the seventh to the second century before Christ, and every burial investigated is a woman's: hence the idea of a community devoted to Jupiter, who had a sanctuary on the mount. Among the grave goods there are little glass heads of Phoenician-Punic make, unique attestations for this part of Italy on the Adriatic side. And there are three stelae of local stone, narrow and elongated, with the eyes and the mouth cut into them and a hollow on top for something separate, perhaps a headdress, as on the warrior of Capestrano: they are in the archaeological museum of Chieti, and they count for a good deal in the Picene world of the fifth century.

The castrum was called Pinna, after the hill it sits on, and the Lombards made it; the church of Sant'Andrea gave the rest of the name. In 1814 the village joined the anti-French insurrection: the blow failed, some of the conspirators fled into the Papal State, others were taken and executed — the doctor Filippo La Noce and Bernardo De Micaeliis — and a plaque at the Porta Nuova of Penne remembers it. Between 1940 and 1943 twenty-two foreign Jewish refugees were interned here, one of the largest groups in the province of Teramo, and after 8 September 1943 not one of them was caught. Today the village is the cradle of the Laccio d'amore dance and holds an international folklore meeting; in September comes the festa della pagnotta, with dances that redo old propitiatory rites.