According to oral tradition, it seems that San Michele, who left from the East to defeat paganism, stopped in a wood near Liscia before arriving on the Gargano; this wood is located around Monte Sorbo, an area that in ancient times had a high anthropic density, as can be seen from the remarkable archaeological material found here and coming from Italic tombs. Still on the subject of legend, it is said that a man from Palmoli, a village in the upper Vasto bordering Liscia, intent on grazing cows near the Treste river, noticed that a young bull got lost every day and then returned in the evening. One day, however, the farmer, intrigued by this mysterious behavior, decided to follow his animal and saw that the vegetation opened up, as if by magic, as it passed, as if to indicate a direction to follow; this strange path led him to a cave where he saw the bull kneeling in front of a wooden image of St. Michael the Archangel, which miraculously made water gush out so that man could quench his thirst and recover from the discovery to witness this event supernatural. In memory of these events that occurred in Liscia, the Marquesses of Avalos, in the eighteenth century incorporated the cave inside a small church, perhaps, to regulate the large influx of pilgrims who are here recalled by popular devotion to the Archangel Michael, a cult that is lost in the mists of time.
Translated by Google •
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