At nine hundred and ninety-eight metres, this is the second highest comune in Campania, and from the bell tower of the mother church, on clear days, you can see four regions — Campania, Basilicata, Molise and Apulia — and the Adriatic. The name says what the place was for: it comes from warda, a Germanic word meaning a watch-post. The Lombards founded Guardia between 571 and 591 as a forward post, and put a castle on the height to watch for armies coming from the east towards Benevento. The second half of the name, though, has been misread for centuries: people took those «Lombardi» to be the Lombards, whereas today it is thought more likely that they were groups who came in the Norman period from Lombardy itself, as happened with the Gallo-Italic villages of Basilicata a little further south. The spelling has never settled: Guardia Lombardorum, Guardiae de Lombardis, Guardia Longobardorum, Guardialombarda, Guardia Lombarda, Guardia dei Lombardi, and at last Guardia Lombardi.
Guardia lies in the seismic district of Irpinia, and on 23 November 1980 the earthquake took it: in the territory of this comune alone two thousand two hundred and one people were left without a house — seventy-three out of every hundred then living here — and seventeen were injured. The winter up here is hard: the snow can cut the village off, and from November to April the temperature often falls below zero. The territory is full of springs, and out of one of them comes a river, the Frédane, which runs into the Calore.
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📅 Every year, on 19 April
On 19 April Guardia Lombardi, a municipality of 1,803 inhabitants in the province of Avellino, celebrates its patron Saint Leo IX; in August the historical re-enactment «Tant'anni fa» takes place.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Guardia Lombardi, but an easy day trip away.
