Contrada

Contrada has 3,005 inhabitants in Irpinia, and its name is as ordinary as a name can be: it comes from the late Latin contrata, which meant a quarter, a village. In the first document that names it, of 1213, the place is called "Contrada di Bagnoli", after a nearby hamlet that was already uninhabited by the fourteenth century. Under the houses, traces of the Claudian aqueduct have been found. And there is a hamlet called Ospedale, hospital: the name comes from a building documented in 1170, founded to care for the pilgrims who stopped here on their way to Jerusalem.

In the seventeenth-century palace of the De Mansis there is one detail that says more than a treatise: a covered passage, which here they call the lubbione, joins the palace to the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato. It allowed the lords to attend the services without leaving the house and without mixing with the people of the village. The church of the Ospedale hamlet has a curious history too: although it stands in the province of Avellino, it depended on the archbishop of Salerno, and the question was settled only on 31 July 1854, with a convention approved by the Holy See and by the king of Naples in which the bishop of Avellino received other property in exchange.