Casalbore

Casalbore stands six hundred metres above the Miscano valley, and everything that happened to it came by road. The territory is crossed right through by the Pescasseroli-Candela sheep track, the great way of the flocks; beside the grotto of San Michele ran both the track and the ancient via Minucia, and on Monte Calvello opens the gorge that the Irpini call the valicaturo, the crossing towards Apulia. Livy records Hannibal's passage among the Irpini when he went from Arpi to Telesia in order to avoid the Roman colony of Beneventum: it was probably on that occasion that ancient Casalbore was destroyed. Near the grotto there was an emporium with its doli, the great jars for provisions; on the mountain bronze vessels have been found; in the contrada San Ferro traces of baths, tombs with tear-bottles, lamps and little idols; and inside the town itself the remains of an Italic temple. Most of what has come to light is now in the archaeological museum of Ariano Irpino.

The names here were left by the invasions too. A «Monte Saraceno» was annexed to the land of Casalbore, taking its name from the Saracens who came up from the Adriatic to sack their way towards Benevento: there were a village and a castle there, destroyed in 1268, and today it is called contrada Pescolatorre. The name of the town itself probably comes from casalis Albulus, the white farmstead; a bull of pope Paschal II of 1102 lists its churches as «in Casali Alvulo». On the castle a date is carved, 1216, which according to historians is not the exact date of building but points to the right period, the one in which the country people of these hills entered Norman history. The oldest thing of all, however, is at Santa Maria dei Bossi: well-furnished tombs which carbon fourteen places between the fourth and the third millennium before Christ.