Tortoreto

Tortoreto has 10,442 inhabitants on the Teramo coast, and it was the turtle doves that gave it its name: it was all woodland here, and there were so many of them that in the sixth century pope Gregory the Great noted it in a letter. From that came Turturitus, then Turturetum, then Tortoreto. The town is double: the medieval borgo is up on the hill, with its two quarters of Terravecchia and Terranova, while down by the sea is Tortoreto Lido, with four kilometres of beach.

At the mouth of the Salinello stood Servium, and out of that ground came terracotta statues of four muses, three of them recognised — Erato, Euterpe and Calliope — and a group inspired by the ninth book of the Odyssey. In 867 the emperor Louis II entrusted this territory to Bertarius, abbot of Montecassino. Its neighbour, on the other hand, made itself: until 1956 Alba Adriatica was the hamlet of Tortoreto Stazione, and even today, two comuni though they are, you cannot see where one ends and the other begins.