Porta Catena is the only gate of the medieval city wall remaining in the city, and its construction took place between 1391 and 1439. It has a beautiful pointed arch in brick, surmounted by a round arch, which supports the upper part protruding.
Porta Catena has evidently been remodeled at various times, but some original elements are still present, such as sections of stone masonry, and part of the right side in stone.
Above the door, on the left, the characteristic brick gazebo, with Moorish-style windows built in the 19th century. Despite being a spurious architectural element, it is today part of the profile of the monument, and almost seems to recall the historical facts of which the door was the protagonist. In fact, in 1566, it was violated by the Ottomans commanded by Pialì Pasha, who entered Vasto and set it on fire.
To the left of the door, in the second house, you can see an enormous arch, which was certainly present already in 1793, but it is not known when it was built into the walls, nor what its function was. In front of the door, as mentioned previously, the aedicule of the Madonna della Catena, and the stepped staircase that runs along the arches of the embankment, and leads to the Fonte Nuova, and from there to the beaches of Vasto Marina.
The Madonna della Catena houses a nineteenth-century painting of the deposition of Jesus with the Madonna, Magdalene and a monk. It was built in this place in memory of the landslide, which starting right from Porta Santa Maria, caused a good part of the rocky ridge on which Vasto rests to slide towards the valley, almost up to the church of San Michele. The 1816 event was followed by a terrible epidemic of petechial typhus the following year, when about a sixth of the inhabitants died, including all the descendants of the Amblingh family.
The epidemic represented a real test for the city. Given the need to invoke protection from misfortunes, the people decided to vote for the shrine to the Madonna della Catena, already venerated since the seventeenth century in nearby Chieti, and connected to an apparition that took place in Palermo, where the Madonna had miraculously freed three prisoners from the chains, who had invoked it.
