Lacedonia

Lacedonia is one of only four Campanian comuni whose territory borders two other regions, Puglia and Basilicata. In Roman times it was Aquilonia of the Hirpini, a municipium on the via Appia; in the sixth century the eastern emperor Justinian gave it to the Benedictines; with the Normans it became a bishop's seat and remained one for nine centuries — the first bishop, Simeone, inaugurated the abbey of San Michele Arcangelo at Monticchio in 1059, and after him came sixty-six bishops, down to 1986, when the diocese was joined to that of Ariano. The Norman lord of the fief, Riccardo Balbano, sent sixty foot soldiers and sixty horse to the Third Crusade.

The earthquake of the fifth of December 1456 reduced the town to rubble, and Gabriele Orsini rebuilt it inside a wall with a moat and four gates; his son-in-law Pirro Del Balzo turned castle and borgo into Renaissance shapes, and it was in a church of Lacedonia that the rebel barons led by Del Balzo himself swore the conspiracy against king Ferrante of Aragon, the one that put Aragonese rule over southern Italy at risk. In 1501 Baldassarre Pappacoda built the Castello Nuovo; from 1566 the fief belonged to the Doria, until 1806. After another earthquake, that of 1930, the government rebuilt the town with earthquake-proof houses. The teacher-training school here was founded by Francesco De Sanctis, and on its blue shield Lacedonia carries a silver stork with a snake in its beak, beneath a comet.