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LANCIANO
Lanciano,
like Sulmona, is believed
founded by the hero Solimo (1181 a.C.), companion of Enea
(both fugitives from destroyed Troy), which gave it the name
Anxanon memory of a dead friend. Even being a legend, the
archaeological findings confirm the existence of a settlement
from the bronze age.
Lanciano was then the capital of the Frentani, sannitico italic
people who sided against Rome during the Sannitic wars and
passed later under the power of the Roman Republic, becoming
faithful ally and finally an importan Roman political centre.
Plundered by Goths and devastated by Longobards,
it passed then to the Bizantins, to the Franchi
and then Normanni (1060 d.C.) and was annexed
to the new Reign of Sicily.
It saw then the domination of Svevi, Angioini
and Aragonesi.
In XIV century the city knew a period of economic development
thanks to its trading vocation becoming the greater inhabited
center of Abruzzi.
With the discovery of the Americas and the transfer of the
trading traffics from the Adriatic to the Atlantic also Lanciano
knew a period of economic decline.
Lanciano guards one of greater monuments of the region: the
Romanesque church of Santa Maria Maggiore
(1227) constructed following the rules of the borgognona-cistercense
architecture and embellished by Gothic portal. Other buildings
of cult are San Francesco (1258), Sant'Agostino
(1270), San Biagio (the 1059) and the Basilica
of the Madonna del Ponte, built up at the end of the '700
in neoclassical style.
Of historic and cultural interest also the Torri Montanare,
what remains of the town-walls of fortification constructed
at the end of X century and demolished at the beginnig of
XX century in order to facilitate the expansion of the city.
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