Lanciano

Lanciano is the town of the Frentani, the Roman Anxanum, set on hills between the Sangro valley and the Adriatic coast. Its two great fairs, held in May and September, made it rich, and in 1340 it was the largest town in Abruzzo with 6,500 people and workshops in ceramics, wool, silk, gold and iron. Its pilgrims came to see a Eucharistic miracle.

The fairs fed a long feud with the port of Ortona, whose tolls on goods bound for Lanciano caused repeated wars. Late in the fourteenth century Lanciano obtained from the abbey of San Giovanni in Venere the right to build its own port at San Vito, and the fighting only ended when Saint John of Capistrano mediated in 1427. In 1441 Alfonso V of Aragon, repaying its help against the Angevins, gave it the right to mint coins, and at its peak Lanciano held more than forty fiefs. A bishopric separate from Chieti was created in 1515 and raised to an archbishopric in 1562. The sixteenth century brought decline: in 1544 the town lost many fiefs for backing Francis I of France against Charles V, and in 1640 the Viceroy of Naples sold it to Alessandro Pallavicino. Lanciano kept him out, but in 1646 it was bought by the Marquis of Vasto, and under feudal lords and the plague of 1656 the town was impoverished until it regained its royal status in 1778.