Castilenti

The first name of the place is Castrum Lentius, probably from the name of the landowner. It does not appear in the twelfth-century Catalogus baronum, and it is documented in 1252 with the settlement of Case Egler, the one they call here old Castilenti. The fief later passed to the De Sterlich, who built their marquis's palace on top of the old castle and kept it until 1806. A brick in the façade carries the date 1501; a local legend has it that it was built with three hundred slaves of the marquis. When the French abolished feudalism Castilenti became a municipality, and not without trouble from the De Sterlich: the descendant took up a fight with the town council to claim the property back, and on the twenty-sixth of June 1848 the peasants rose and stormed the palace.

Just outside the centre stands the Fontana Vecchia, of brick, of the fifteen hundreds: it is set into a niche under a round arch, with a mask that pours water from its mouth, and on each of the two side columns a slab carved in relief with a triton coiled around a trident, the sign of Poseidon — a sea god on a hill fountain, above the valley of the Fino. In the same valley stands the convent of Santa Maria di Oliveto, founded in 1598 and then carried through suppressions, reopenings and abandonments all through the eighteen hundreds; the cloister has frescoes with the stories of the Virgin, of Saint Francis and of Saint Bernardino of Siena, and the church a coffered wooden ceiling and an organ of the Neapolitan school. The patron is Saint Victoria, and her feast falls on the twenty-third of December.