Forino

Forino lies in a plain closed in by seven mountains, all of them under 1000 metres, and it owes its existence to a building site. The great Roman aqueduct known as the Claudian, the Fontis Augustei Aquaeductus, passed through here, running in a tunnel along this stretch: the works lasted years, and around them the slaves and the officials directing them settled for good, giving shape to what the documents call the locus Forini. At the same time the censor granted here the nemus corilianum, the wood planted with hazels, to give agriculture a push. Two thousand years later the most widespread crop in the municipality is still the hazel.

In 663 in this basin, ad locum cui Forinus nomen est, the Lombards of duke Romuald of Benevento defeated the Byzantines of Saburro; and in 792 one of the oldest Lombard documents to have reached us in the original was written at Forino, and is kept in the archive of the Santissima Trinità of Cava de' Tirreni. Much later, between 1940 and 1943, the municipality was one of those the fascist authorities designated to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment: ten people, mostly Polish and German, freed when the Allies arrived in September 1943. One of them had died here in the meantime.