Avellino Capital

The ancient Avellino was not here: Abellinum stood on the hill of the Civita, four kilometres away, where Atripalda is today. The Romans took it in 293 BC, Sulla razed it and refounded it as a colony, and Augustus renamed it Livia Augusta after his wife, who owned the land round about. Then in 568, after the Lombards came, the old city was abandoned and its people moved to the hill of the Terra: from there comes the Avellino of today, which is therefore not the same city twice.

It is a town rebuilt several times — the earthquake of 1980, which in Avellino alone killed seventy-two people and left more than seven thousand homeless, is the wound that redrew its face — and so it is better told in its details: the seventeenth-century clock tower, the cathedral on the hill of the ancient city, the elegant avenue of the evening stroll. The basin it sits in is a valley of volcanic origin, closed off by the massif of Montevergine, which comes close to fifteen hundred metres; the countryside around is all hazelnut groves. The sanctuary of Montevergine is reached by the steepest funicular in Europe, and the province lines up three DOCG wines — Taurasi, Fiano and Greco. Irpinia is a slow discovery, and Avellino is its gate.