Altavilla Irpina

The name has travelled a long way. In Lombard times there was a castle here called Altacauda; it was Luigi De Capua, much later, who turned it into Altavilla, recalling at once his own house and the town in Normandy the family came from. The village straddles three hills — Torone, Ripa and Foresta — which are the three mountains on the municipal coat of arms, granted only in 2017 and completed by hazelnuts, in Latin avellanae, the chief product of the surrounding countryside. In 1882 Giovanni Verga set part of his novel Il marito di Elena here.

Then there are the sulphur and the departures. At the end of the nineteenth century one of the most important sulphur deposits in Campania was found here, and Altavilla became the town of sulphur; the mine, on the boundary with Tufo, is today a site of industrial archaeology. But people also left in great numbers: between the wars for France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Argentina, Canada, Venezuela and Australia, and again in the nineteen-sixties. Those who went to Australia mostly settled around Adelaide, where the Altavilla community is still large and where it is not rare to hear men of seventy speaking Irpinian dialect in the street. In the house where he was born there is a museum to Alberico Crescitelli, the missionary killed in China in 1900 during the Boxer rebellion.