Casalanguida

The name comes from the late Latin languena, which means border land, and a border place this has always been: in the thirteenth century the documents call it Casalangenam in Terra Burellensi, that is in the land of the Borrello, and the fief belonged to a knight, Mathias de Carpeneto, who in turn held it from another lord. The fortified borgo goes back to the thirteenth century, and its towers to the fifteenth: all three are still there, but you have to know where to look, because the palaces have eaten them. One is clad in cement in via Marconi, one — the tower of the Cauli — stands inside the palace of the barons Cauli di Policorno, and the third is swallowed by palazzo Procaccini. They are made of river pebbles, and in the walls you can pick out older pieces of stone put back in: corbels, jambs, architraves, sills and gargoyles.

Between 1315 and 1320 a famine — or a plague — struck Casalanguida and nearby San Buono so severely that the fiefs around had to contribute out of their own pockets to set them back on their feet. The mother church, Santa Maria Maddalena, is older than those years: it already appears in the tithes of 1324, it was enlarged in the sixteenth century and restored twice in the nineteenth, in 1832 and in 1843; above the entrance it has an organ of polychrome wood. At the crossing of via Straripola and via Nuova stands instead the fountain of San Rocco, neoclassical, with certain sculptures on top that look like winged horses. And at the edge of the territory, towards Carpineto Sinello, there is the fortified hamlet of Policorvo: an eleventh-century casale, rebuilt in the eighteenth, which was once a castle and still keeps its palatine chapel.