Every year, for the feast of 28 April, about forty-five thousand loaves of bread are baked at Castelvetere. The wood begins to be gathered in March; then the parish priest and a group of willing helpers comb the village and the countryside to be given flour, or the money to buy it; and finally the old women of the place shut themselves in a small room with an oven and knead, bake and draw out for days. The tortani, the Madonna's bread, are carried from house to house by the procession of the spunziatrici: girls of about eight, dressed in white and loaded with gold jewellery in imitation of the statue of the Madonna delle Grazie, each with her godmother and a cavalier — usually a relative, with a stick to defend them. The feast was born of a bequest: an old woman left a piece of wheat land so that the harvest should be baked into bread for the poor. And the date comes from a snowfall: the Madonna, appearing to an old woman nobody would believe, promised to make snow fall on the exact spot where she wanted her church, and the village found it at the foot of the castle. It was 28 April.
The castle has to do with the name as well: castrum vetus, old castle, because the houses grew up around the Lombard fortification. Of the castle there is no castle left today: rebuilt, it became the mother church dedicated to the Assumption, and the old centre around it, made of narrow lanes and houses of bare stone, is called the Ripa. The village appears in documents in 991, when it is donated to the monastery of San Benedetto at Salerno, then in 1167 it goes to Montevergine, and in 1684 it is sold to Giuseppe de Beaumont, who becomes its baron. Then there is a distinction worth telling: here the cemetery was moved outside the built-up area long before the Edict of Saint-Cloud required it, and the cemetery chapel was built by the express order of Ferdinand IV, as the inscription at the entrance says. The present name is recent: until 1950 the village was Castelvetere di Calore. It stands at seven hundred and fifty metres, below Monte Tuoro, and from up there twenty-eight villages can be seen.
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📅 Every year, on 28 April (with the bread distribution also on the 29th) and on 2 July
On 28 April Castelvetere sul Calore, a municipality of 1,672 inhabitants in the province of Avellino, celebrates its patroness Our Lady of Graces with the procession of the spunziatrici, girls dressed in white and adorned with gold who take bread to every house.
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The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Castelvetere sul Calore, but an easy day trip away.
