Atripalda

Here, they say, the oldest act of gallantry in Italy took place. On a winter night in 1254 the Swabian king Manfred, hunted by the papal troops, left Naples heading for the principality of Taranto; the lords of the castle that overlooks the town, Marino and Corrado Capece, faithful to the Swabians, opened their gates to him without fearing the reprisals of the papacy. To repay the hospitality Manfred had their two young wives brought before him and wanted them to sit at his sides and dine with him: the custom of the courts obliged sovereigns to eat alone, rigorously excluding women, held to be inferior beings. The Historia of Nicolò Jamsilla attributes to him the words with which he announced that he would break that barbarous usage from that day on, adding that the castle of Tripaldo would keep his memory. It was the statesman Pasquale Stanislao Mancini who told the story again, in the nineteenth century. Of the castle only stones remain.

The name of the town is a Lombard's: Atrepald, in the vulgar form Truppoaldo, a nobleman of Avellino who owned wide farmlands in the Sabato valley and obtained recognition of autonomy for the population scattered in the area, detaching it administratively from nearby Lombard Avellino. That was the birth certificate of Atripalda. Underneath, however, there is something far older: on the tufa plateau that dominates the built-up area stood Abellinum, a Samnite settlement and then a Roman colony willed by Sulla in the year 82 before Christ, which its inhabitants abandoned after earthquakes, eruptions and wars to move to where Avellino stands today. Roman Avellino, in short, is here. Inside the mother church of Sant'Ippolisto the Specus Martyrum is preserved, considered one of the major monuments of Christian archaeology in the South. Atripalda was given the title of city by royal decree of 18 July 1867; and it lies in the Irpinia seismic district, so much so that in the earthquake of 1980 fifteen per cent of the population was left homeless and there were three victims.