The colossal spider

D'Annunzio called them that, and the name has stuck. Wooden fishing machines suspended over the water, on a coast where oranges still grow.

From the far tip of the right-hand headland, above a group of rocks, a trabocco reached out, a strange fishing machine made entirely of planks and beams, like a colossal spider…

The oldest trabocco still standing is at San Vito Chietino and is called Punta Turchino. It is the one D'Annunzio described, and nearby stands the hermitage he used to stay in, from which a wide stretch of coast can be seen.

The Costa dei Trabocchi is the coastline of the province of Chieti: Ortona, San Vito Chietino, Rocca San Giovanni, Fossacesia, Torino di Sangro, Casalbordino, Vasto, San Salvo. Since 2006, when the Adriatic railway line was decommissioned, a cycleway has run along it from Francavilla to San Salvo.

Orange gardens in the open field

A few metres from the sea, on this coast, citrus fruit has been grown since at least 1442 — the date of a notarial deed from the Vasto area. Not under glass: in the open field, with no walls to shelter it.

The climate crisis of the 17th century, the “little ice age”, destroyed all the orange groves along the shore and wiped the citron off the Vasto coast. In the 18th century the crop came back, but in the 19th a blow of a different kind arrived: the railway, which brought Sicilian oranges this far.

Today only a few islands are left. At Vasto they survive in the small valleys that open towards the sea; at Rocca San Giovanni they are concentrated in the Vallevò district, sheltered by tall bay hedges and by canes. The water comes from springs and is gathered in tanks, and around each tree a small circular hollow — the “bacile” — is dug to hold it.

The temple that looks out

At Fossacesia, 107 metres above sea level, stands a Benedictine abbey built where a temple to Venus Conciliatrix once stood. At the summer solstice the light of the setting sun touches the doorway — which is why it is called the Portal of the Moon — and lights up the presbytery and the crypt.

The landscape was once different: the Sangro turned the area to marsh, the sea reached as far as today's fields, and in Roman times there was a harbour below. The river was navigable for several kilometres inland — towards the valley that the rest of this Ecomuseum comes from.