Overview
A pleasant altitude (about 390 metres) and a "strategic" location have allowed the territory of Fresagrandinaria, in the province of Chieti, to be inhabited and experienced for more than thousands of years.
Thanks to some findings - including an earthenware fragment with an Oscan inscription (the language spoken by Italic peoples) studied even by Theodor Mommsen, the greatest classicist of the 19th century - it is certain that the area was inhabited by the Frentani and then the Romans. Later came the Lombards, who settled in the Fara and Guardiola districts along the banks of the waterways.
Think of how many people once crowded the territory and today you see no one, only nature and tiny houses, which compose the small village with a long and high-sounding name. It is first found in a 1115 document and derives from its "owners", the wealthy Barons Grandinati. According to tradition, they had a daughter, Frisia.
On the other hand, dated more than a century earlier is the ruin you spot in the surrounding countryside, all that remains of the religious building dedicated to Sant'Angelo, the monastery of the Benedictines, the first "colonizers" of the territory in the Year 1000.
You certainly will find pleasant the medieval village, made up of buildings constructed by the skilled and centuries-old mastery of limestone and sandstone workers, with the elegant palaces De Lellis, Rocchio, De Martinis, Cosmo Terpolilli.
Also visit the small church of Madonna delle Grazie, at the foot of the village, which houses a beautiful 15th-century golden statue depicting a Madonna and Child, and certainly the Museum of Farming and Migration of the Trigno Valley: installed in the ancient premises of a medieval tavern, it displays material coming largely from donations by citizens, such as old hand-built toys and old images related to the rural village, connected to ordinary and festive clothes, gastronomy, rural dwellings, housework and outdoor work and handicrafts.
Thrilling is the section dedicated to the phenomenon of migration, which has characterized the life of the country, starting in 1882 to the Americas, then to Australia, Africa, Belgium, France, Germany and the big Italian cities, until the 1970s: dozens and dozens, among documents, municipal registers of passports issued, direct testimonies of descendants... they tell you the story of when the migrants were us.
The only thing left is to get to know the typical dishes, which have not disappeared. On the contrary, they have been strengthened by experience and peasant wisdom. For example, the "classic" porchetta al forno (which speaks the language of central-southern Italy), the "treccitella" (rolls of tender kid or lamb guts, rolled around stalks of oregano), the "viscìca", which elsewhere they call ventricina, and then taralli and "cellipieni", typical local sweets.