Elice is the holm oak: ilex, ilicis, the tree that once covered these hills above the valley of the Fino. The place is in the papers from the eleventh century, and in 1084 a Norman count gave the castle to the abbey of San Giovanni in Venere along with the men, the lands and the buildings — the men counted in among the goods. In 1168 the castle had two hundred and sixty-four inhabitants: a figure written down, which for a village of this size is a rarity. And in 1284 the lords granted the università of Elice the right to hold a market every Monday, on one condition: that it should not be to the prejudice of the neighbours nor to the expense of the state.
In 1461 king Ferrante of Aragon granted the criminal jurisdiction over Elice, in perpetuity, to four Castiglione brothers: Baldassarre, Melchiorre, Gaspare and Agamennone — three Magi and a Greek king. The family held the fief until the laws that abolished feudalism. Then the village lived by its hands: a tannery founded in the eighteen hundreds traded as far as Dalmatia, and Pietro Baroni, mayor until his death in 1893, set up inside the rooms of the castle a works for terracotta and ceramics — and it was for the ceramics that Elice was known at the end of that century.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Elice
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
