Capriglia Irpina

The name comes from the Latin caprile, the goat stall, and the coat of arms says the same thing: a goat standing on a hill of two humps. The village did in fact grow on a hill where, in late Roman times, shepherds brought their flocks to spend the summer. The mother church of San Nicola di Bari is sixteenth-century but stands over a building of the tenth, and Roman pieces are set into its outer walls; inside it has three naves and a high altar of polychrome marble. The little church of Sant'Antonio is recognisable by its front of Pompeian red.

The fief passed among the great houses of the kingdom of Naples — the Carafa, the Caracciolo princes of Avellino, the Schipani — and in 1738 the Schipani sold it to the marquis of Arneto, Gaetano Amoretti. Amoretti died without sons, and so in 1780 the village was bought, for about forty-two thousand ducats, by Nicola Macedonio of the dukes of Grottolella, who held it with the title of marquis; his family kept it until feudal rights were abolished, in 1806. On the site of a medieval castle the Carafa built their palace, which the village still calls the castle: from that family, and from this very place, came Gian Pietro Carafa, who became pope Paul the Fourth.