Andretta

In a district called Pero Spaccone a patch of ochre has been identified, datable between 32000 and 31000 BC: colour, prepared and left there by somebody in the Palaeolithic. Since then the territory has never really been empty. There is a stone cutting tool older still, there are Neolithic potsherds at Bosco San Giovanni and near the fountain of Cervino, and at Cervino itself a stable settlement from the end of the Bronze Age, where the Hirpini and then the Romans installed themselves; from late Roman times a rustic villa and structures in the Toppa Schiavi district remain. On Monte San Giovanni, finally, open the rock cavities called Li Urtuni, dated to 555 and used as shelter: by refugees from the war of Conza, or by those who followed the drove roads.

The village proper was born around a castrum tied to Conza, and the fief appears for the first time in a document of 1124, in the hands of Roberto di Folleville. Then it passed through so many houses that at a certain point it ended up divided among the Piscicelli and had to be reunified. The town sits on a high hill dominating the valley of the Ofanto, and the earthquake of 1980 did it very grave damage. In the upper part a parish priest who came from Cairano, don Leone, made out of the natural hollows of Monte Airola a place of devotion: the stations of the Passion, a stone altar, a shrine with majolica tiles, and at the summit an enormous iron cross. From here come Antonio Miele, a patriot priest and a deputy in the first Italian Parliament, and Francesco Tedesco, several times a minister under Giolitti, whose family palace faces the square that bears his name; and since 1996 the comune has been twinned with Ramapo, in the state of New York, where its emigrants had gone.