Contigliano

The name is a Roman estate: the ager Quintilianus of Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, the rhetorician of the first century, a Sabine by origin and an adviser of Vespasian, who after leaving public teaching lived on his own land, and that land filled with houses. The papers keep the name: a Farfa document of 850 calls the place Fundus Quintilianus, and in 1157 it is the Castrum Quintilianum. Further back still, on the hill of Montisola, there was a lake village lived in from the early Bronze Age to the Iron Age: it has been identified with Issa, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus places on an island within the ancient lake Velino, later drained — and Issa is the Greek word for island.

On the seventh of August 1501 the knight Vitellozzo Vitelli, marching towards L'Aquila in the pope's service, turned on Contigliano: the town had refused victuals for his men, and a woman had struck him with a large stone and wounded him. The castle gave way in a short time; his mercenaries broke in, made a slaughter of the townspeople, sacked the place and set the houses on fire. Contigliano recovered, and by 1561 it had already grown beyond its first ring of walls. In the collegiate church, begun in 1683 and finished in 1747, hangs a painting of 1724 in which Saint Vincent Ferrer intercedes to free the village from the wolves that infested it. And at Terria, in the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Valadier rebuilt a villa and raised beneath it the artificial hill it stands on, to keep it above the floods of the Velino.