[3] In 1026, Dominic of Sora established the monastery of San Pietro Avellano, at the instigation of Count Oderisio Borello, and a village began to form nearby.

The abbey at San Pietro Avellano was abandoned after a devastating earthquake in 1441, but the village remained an ecclesiastical dependency of Monte Cassino until 1785.

Many descendants of the original San Pietro Avellana, a village with a population well over 2,000, live in the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Youngstown areas in the United States.

Then he became a hermit and afterwards a monk, his example inducing, it is said, his father and mother, brothers and nephews also to embrace the religious life.

But St Amicus found the discipline of his monastery insufficiently austere, and he again became a solitary, this time in the Abruzzi.