Aquilonia

Until 1861 the town was called Carbonara. In 1860 there had been here a bloody popular rising for the Bourbons against the unity of Italy, which ended with nine dead, and in 1861 the place was taken by Carmine Crocco's brigands; to wipe the anti-unification stain off its own history, the liberal administration asked for and obtained a change of name. The name chosen, Aquilonia, rests however on a mistake: a sixteenth-century learned tradition had identified Carbonara with the Aquilonia of the Hirpini — which is in fact today's Lacedonia — and had confused that, in its turn, with the Aquilonia of the Pentri, famous for a battle between Samnites and Romans, which stood somewhere else entirely. The old name survived all the same, in Latin, inside the civic arms: olim mihi fuit nomen Carbonara. Once my name was Carbonara.

On 23 July 1930 the earthquake of the Vulture destroyed the settlement, which was rebuilt higher up; the old town was definitively abandoned after the war. What is left of it is now an archaeological park: the street plan is intact, and some buildings have been restored — one of them holds a museum. A few hundred metres away stands the washing fountain of 1792, which served the town for the laundry, for the house and as a trough for the animals; there are many other springs in this territory, all of them named, and people walk among them. And near the abbey of San Vito there is a centuries-old oak that people hold to be under the saint's protection: the story goes that an axe would stick fast in the trunk, and that the branches would weep blood.