Tossicia

Nobody agrees about the name of Tossicia, and there are four hypotheses in the field. It might come from baron Tosia di Ornano Grande, to whom some attribute the founding of the village in the ninth century; or from Turris Sicula, a tower of considerable size that loomed over the Valle Siciliana and whose two words would have fused and contracted; or from Latin personal names such as tossiasius or tussius. But on certain maps of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the village is written Toxicia, and the root tox, the one in the Latin toxicum, that is poison, gives weight to the last hypothesis: that the name comes from the snakes, which here were many and troubled the inhabitants. The village stretches along the top of a rocky spur between the torrents of the Valle and the Chiarino, on the northern side of the Gran Sasso, and is built almost entirely of local stone between the seventeen and eighteen hundreds; but in the alleys and the little stepped streets there remain medieval houses with the Orsini insignia, mullioned windows and lintels carved with coats of arms.

The rest is dates. According to tradition, in 1217 Francis of Assisi came here, sent by the bishop of Penne to act as peacemaker in the quarrel that had broken out among the local barons over the lordship of the territory. In 1420 Niccola de' Palmieri, personal physician to king Ladislas, died in the village where he had been born. In 1526 Charles V gave the Valle Siciliana to don Ferrante de Alarcón, a Spanish captain who had distinguished himself at the siege of Pavia: he was made marquis of the valley, and his descendants held Tossicia until Joseph Bonaparte abolished feudal rights. On the twenty-first of October 1860 the plebiscite brought the village into the Kingdom of Italy. And exactly eighty years later, on the twenty-first of October 1940, Tossicia became the seat of a local concentration camp — one of the few of which there are certain records — which stayed open until the twenty-sixth of September 1943.