In 1846 Ferdinand II of Bourbon was a guest on the Iscalunga plain, and the house that received him was Palazzo Corbo. The Corbo family of Avigliano spent their summers here, but the building was above all the administrative centre of a farm estate reckoned among the most advanced in the Lagopesole fief. Its fortune was built by Giulio Corbo, who held significant political office and ran the estate along lines considered innovative for the time. Nineteenth-century accounts describe a conspicuous building, magnificent enough to stand comparison with the better-known medieval castles.
What to see
Some fifteen years after the royal visit the same place turns up in papers of a very different kind. Iscalunga — spelled Iscalonga or Escalunga in the documents — was one of the gathering points of Carmine Donatelli Crocco's bands. In 1863 Captain Della Chiesa chased a group of brigands falling back between Lagopesole castle and the farmstead; on 30 May 1864 a telegram from the Avigliano magistrate to the prefect of Potenza reported that national guard and carabinieri posted at Iscalunga had taken a prisoner and that the band leader Malacarne had been killed.
The family's arc closed quickly. The Corbo declined from the end of the nineteenth century, and both palace and estate were confiscated and handed over to the peasants' league of Lagopesole: the manor house of one of the fief's most advanced farming operations passed to the people who worked its land.
Visiting
The palace now belongs to the municipality of Filiano, which bought and restored it: the recovered rooms house a conference hall. It keeps no museum hours, opening when something is on, so the sensible move is to ask at the town hall before setting out. Iscalunga lies in open country outside the village, towards Lagopesole, on the same plain that runs through the brigandage chronicles.
Our editors' tip
Fit Lagopesole castle into the same day: it is the far end of the corridor crossing this plain, and in those same years it was where captured brigands faced the firing squad. On 28 September 1862 Giuseppe Papariello of Vietri was shot there, taken in a skirmish close to Iscalunga.