Sant'Omero

The church of Santa Maria a Vico is of the tenth century, and the Teramo archaeologist Francesco Savini held it to be the oldest in Abruzzo; it is in any case the most complete monument older than the year one thousand to have come down to us in the region, and since 1902 it has been on the list of national monuments. Recent research suggests it stands on a temple of Hercules, and inside it keeps a Roman inscription that names that temple: the church held on to the receipt for the building it replaced. Out in the fields, at a place called Vallorina, a milestone came to light in 1823 with the number 119 cut into it, the miles from Rome: proof that the road running down from the capital to the Adriatic passed this way, through the Val Vibrata and the Salinello gorges. In 1993 the stone was still in a private house.

The names come from the same source. The Castrum Rufi was the estate of Lucius Tarius Rufus, and from that Rufus comes Garrufo, today one of the hamlets. From 1382 Sant'Omero belonged to the Acquaviva of Atri, and some hold that the family itself began in a district of this comune called Acquaviva. Then, on 6 April 1639, don Alvaro de Alarcón y Mendoza bought the fiefs of Sant'Omero and Poggio Morello for twenty-four thousand ducats and moved his household and his business here. In the countryside of the Val Vibrata what survives instead are the earth houses, built out of what was there.