Decollatura has 3,252 inhabitants in a valley at the foot of Monte Reventino, where the river Amato rises. For centuries it was said that the name came from a beheading: a battle between Pyrrhus and the Mamertines that ended with a great many soldiers decapitated, a notion put about by two sixteenth-century historians. Of that battle, however, no historical or archaeological trace has ever been found in these parts, and the explanation has been abandoned. A study of 2017 proposes a much more prosaic and much more likely one: Decollatura controls the pass between the Lamezia plain and the interior, and corretura was the old word for the right of passage. It would therefore be the place where you paid the toll, and the town still has a quarter called Passaggio, where the toll was in fact collected.
The birth of the comune is a story about taxes too. People had come down here from Motta Santa Lucia, at first only for the season and then for good, after the earthquake of 1638 had flattened Motta; the diocese of Martirano granted the land in emphyteusis and the taxation of the d'Aquino did the rest. In 1802 the inhabitants of all the villages sued their own comune before the royal chamber of the Sommaria in Naples, arguing that Motta's administrators taxed them heavily and gave them neither services nor assistance in return. And they won. Giuseppe Scalzo signed the deed of separation, and a few days later the heads of families, gathered on the forecourt of the church of San Bernardo, acclaimed him unanimously as their first mayor.
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📅 Every year, on 15 August; the September Fair since 1889
Decollatura celebrates Mary of the Assumption on 15 August. On 20 and 21 September, the Fiera del XX Settembre is held, established in 1889 and once of great regional renown for livestock trading.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Decollatura, but an easy day trip away.
