Sant'Egidio alla Vibrata

Sant'Egidio alla Vibrata has 9,668 inhabitants in the Val Vibrata, on the border with the Marche. For centuries it was a "royal city", like Civitella del Tronto: which meant paying no feudal dues, and it lasted until 1642, when it was made a fief. From then on it was sold like any other piece of property — in the seventeenth century it changed hands for 780 ducats — until feudalism came to an end. The full name arrived in 1863, when the comune of Faraone was merged into it.

And Faraone is the most striking thing in the territory: an early medieval fortified village with nobody left inside it. An earthquake and a spreading landslide made the houses unsafe, and in 1952 a decree of the President of the Republic ordered all the inhabitants moved to a new site. What remains are the walls, the southern gate and the church of Santa Maria della Misericordia. The church of Sant'Egidio Abate, on the other hand, is still standing and in use: Romanesque, of the twelfth century, rebuilt after the war damage of the fourteenth, with a Renaissance portal bearing the radiant sun of Saint Bernardino.