Cantalice

In the Middle Ages the entrance to the territory of Cantalice was marked by two great oaks, standing where the village of Vazia now is, and traces of that boundary remain in the documents from century to century. One was left by the procurator sent by the vicar general of Abruzzo after the earthquake of 1703: he writes that once past the pass of the two oaks the damage is plain to see, and that although only one house had collapsed from its foundations, inside the built-up area forty-three buildings were uninhabitable. The surprising thing is that the pass still exists: two great centuries-old oaks stand on the right-hand side of the road climbing from Vazia, just before the sign, and they go on serving as the doorway into the village. The tree is in the name too: Cantalice would come from catà and ilex, by the holm oak, and a holm oak is on the coat of arms as well, beside an eagle, a tower and a lion.

That holm oak, tradition says, sprang up all at once from the fissures of a rock behind the sacristy of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The stone was held to bring fertility, and for that very reason it was removed in the thirteenth century by order of pope Innocent the Third, to whom such devotion seemed too pagan. Kept in secret for centuries, it reappeared around 1610 beside the Scentella fountain, and has stayed there ever since: it even survived the works of 1952, when the spring was turned into a fountain with a washhouse, and the stone was taken out of the dry-stone wall and set again a little further along, where it can still be seen. The borders, here, have shifted a good deal too: for more than six hundred years the village belonged to the giustizierato of Abruzzo and then to the province of Abruzzo Ultra II of the Kingdom of Naples, and it stayed in the province of L'Aquila until 1927. With Rieti it quarrelled at length, up to the assault of 1557, which the inhabitants beat back: since then the town bears the motto Fortis Cantalica Fides.