Carife

On the arms of Carife there are two hands clasping each other. They come out from the flanks of the shield, with forearms clothed in red and blue cuffs, and they are not an invention of modern heraldry: the comune took up this emblem in 1742, and it was that of the collegiate church of San Giovanni Battista. Above the door of the church, together with the hands, there is a set of initials that nobody has yet read with certainty: RPQC. Some say it stands for Respice Popule Quantam Caritatem, look, o people, how much love; others for Res PopulusQue Carifii. The village lies at seven hundred and forty metres, on a hill at the foot of the spur of Trevico, and looks over the whole valley of the Ufita; the name is pre-Roman and ties in with Oscan-Umbrian forms such as Callifae. In its countryside is one of the most important archaeological areas of the Irpinia: at the locality of Addolorata the Samnite tombs of the Irpinian necropolis have come to light, and at the Aia di Cappitella obsidian finds and pottery of the fourth and third millennium before Christ.

The earthquake of 1732 flattened almost everything. The mother church was rebuilt and reopened for worship in 1754 — the date is on the arms of the baroque doorway — with a gabled front and a Latin-cross plan that seem the work of the school of Vanvitelli; inside there are a wooden crucifix of 1757, a polyptych of the Madonna del Rosario of 1585 from the school of Andrea Sabatini of Salerno and a Spanish reliquary with a fragment of the wood of the Cross, which came here as a gift of the Bourbons to the Capobianco marquises. The marquis's palace fell too, and to rebuild it an Alsatian technique was used: horizontal and vertical beams alternating, to give the structure more stability. The Capobianco had bought that fief in 1646 for seventeen thousand four hundred ducats, and in 1677 Charles II of Spain had made Antonio Capobianco marquis of Carife.