Domicella

In 1929, while the old parish house on the road between Palma and Lauro was being demolished, a great villa rustica of the imperial age came to light. Several rooms were uncovered with plastered walls, a cella vinaria, two barrel-vaulted basins with floors of opus signinum, a portico with brick columns and three great jars sunk into the ground, the dolii defossi, stamped with the name of the man who made them: C. Julius Felix, a freedman of the Julian family. The name of the town says the same thing in Latin: domus-cella, that is the storehouse, the granary of a farm, and also the lodging of the slaves who worked it; others derive it instead from domus Coeli, the villa of the Coelii, a family of Roman landowners whose presence is attested between Pompeii and Nola.

The first medieval mention is a notarial act of 979, by which the Lombard prince Pandolfo gives the abbot of Santa Maria di Spelonca everything he owns «in loco Domicella». Three years later another document shows Pietro, Giovanni and other inhabitants making an agreement about a piece of land «in Domucella, at the place called the gallows». By 1093 the town already had its church, which that year bishop Sassone gave to the Benedictines of San Lorenzo d'Aversa: the abbey took the whole borgo a few years later, and in 1187 still owned most of its lands and houses. Then the usual line of lords — the del Balzo, the Orsini of Nola, the Sanseverino, the Pignatelli, a count they called «O Cammisaro», the Lancellotti. Domicella belonged to the Terra di Lavoro and passed only in 1861 to the province of Avellino, of which it is still the last strip stretching towards the Neapolitan country: with Carbonara di Nola it now makes a single built-up area.