Aiello del Sabato

The name comes from the Latin agellus, a diminutive of ager, field; the second part was added to tell the town apart from its many namesakes and comes from the river Sabato, which, however — and this is the curious thing — neither crosses nor touches the municipal territory: it runs a little more than a kilometre to the east. The old centre occupies a hill of about 440 metres and looks on one side over the whole urban system of Avellino, of which the comune is part, and on the other over the upper Sabato valley. Excavations suggest that there were people here in Roman times and perhaps as early as the palaeolithic, and that the houses on the surrounding hills were Roman villas or shelters during the Lombard invasions; the first written documents are of 1045. The municipal coat of arms is an oak on a three-peaked mountain, with the words UNIVERSITAS AJELLI in gold capitals.

The mother church, Santa Maria della Natività, is first mentioned in 1164; the present structure is probably of the sixteenth century, but from the seventeen-hundreds onwards it has been restored several times because of earthquake damage. The church of San Sebastiano e Fabiano has on its portal an inscription that would date it to 1830, and it was linked to the nearby Palazzo Ricciardelli by a passage that was walled up during the second world war; on the façade of San Pietro Apostolo, in the hamlet of Sabina, there is instead a statue of Roman origin. In that same Palazzo Ricciardelli, tradition says, queen Joanna the First of Naples stayed for twenty-five days: out of that memory came Favolarte, held since 2008 in the first week of August, a kind of medieval reality show with four princesses — one for each quarter of the town — shut in by the queen within the walls of a castle for seventy-two hours. Since 2003, on the first weekend of September, there is instead the Fiano Music Festival, which puts together the wines of Irpinia and swing and jazz concerts.