Cesinali

The name comes from the Germanic cesine, the coppice wood, that is land cleared to make room for houses and fields. The settlement is Lombard in origin and grew alongside nearby Atripalda, with which Cesinali shared its masters and its history for centuries: Filangieri, Carafa, Caracciolo. Its independence, too, has had an interruption: in 1927 the village was merged into the neighbouring comune of Aiello del Sabato, and it became independent again only in 1950. The mother church of San Silvestro Papa, with its gabled front, is of the second half of the sixteenth century, and San Rocco was a funerary chapel before it was rebuilt in the eighteenth.

What is worth knowing here is the calendar. At Carnival they perform the Zeza; on Holy Saturday there is the Rosammarina, the carrying to each family in the village, with traditional songs, of a conifer branch decorated with citrus fruit, as a wish for the Easter about to come; and on Good Friday, since the nineteen-sixties, a company of amateur actors has staged the Passion, from a text by the writer Carmine Fernando Venezia. Since 1997 the village has also had a permanent theatre company, with seasons and acting courses, and in summer the hamlet of Villa San Nicola hosts a music festival. The fields are mostly vines and hazel groves.