Castelfranci

The most important church in Castelfranci was built, tradition says, against the parish priest's will. A poor woman dreamed of the Virgin asking her to have a chapel raised at a place called the Ortora; she went to the priest and was laughed at. She came back a second time and was driven off with violence. The third time the Virgin told her in a dream that she would leave a sign: enough snow would fall on that spot to mark out the perimeter of the chapel. The next day, which was the first Sunday of August, the villagers and the incredulous priest saw on the ground the plan of a church sculpted in snow. Since then the feast has been kept on the first Sunday of August, and the source notes that this sanctuary, unlike other places of worship, was willed by the people. That the building is of the sixteenth century is suggested also by a curious document: the poster printed in 1926 to celebrate the fourth centenary.

The name of the town comes from a deed disguised as a bull. On the sixth of June 1248 pope Innocent IV, from Lyon, restored to Bella De Amicis, widow of Guglielmo di Montemarano, the land of Castrum de Francis, which had belonged to the De Montania family: from that Castrum de Francis comes Castelfranci, and the document that gives it its name is the restitution of a holding to a widow. The town stands on a clayey slope along the Calore Irpino, in an area where landslides and slippages are a constant danger, and the vineyards around it give an aglianico from which appellation wines are made. Palazzo Vittoli, neoclassical, is of 1818 and during the Risorgimento was probably the seat of a Carboneria cell. The earthquake of 1980 caused deaths and injuries there and damaged more than twelve hundred building units, in a comune whose population was little over two thousand.