Lapio is one of the very few Italian comuni that produce two guaranteed-denomination wines within their own territory: Fiano and Taurasi. Of the first, indeed, this is the chosen homeland, and some maintain that the village's name comes precisely from the grape: the farming area is said to have been called Apia, whence apiana, the grape the Latin poets already knew, and from there Lapio. The other etymology is plainer and just as plausible: from the Latin lapideum, that is, stony. The coat of arms granted in 2002 does not choose and keeps them all together: there is the bee, standing for industriousness but also for the Latin apis; there are the ears of wheat for agriculture; there is the mount for the ad lapideum; and there are the grapes for Fiano. Some elements come from a municipal seal of 1879, while in 1865 the village used a quartered emblem with four golden bees on a silver field.
The most deeply felt tradition, however, has nothing to do with wine: it is the Misteri, twenty-two papier-mâché tableaux depicting the Passion, from the selling by Judas to the death on the cross. A document found in the State Archive of Avellino — a petition by the prior Tommaso Statuto of 1840 — says they were commissioned in Naples around 1810 by the confraternity of the Madonna della Neve, which still owns them today. They are displayed in the mother church on the Saturday before Palm Sunday and then go out through the streets on Good Friday. In the village there are four confraternities, the mother church of Santa Caterina d'Alessandria with the monumental tomb of cardinal Giuseppe Caprio, and the remains of the castle beside the baronial palace of the Filangieri, built between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Calore, finally, stands the Ponte Principe: built in 1893 for the Avellino-Rocchetta railway, about three hundred metres long on two arches with spans of nearly one hundred metres each, it was tested on 20 September of that year before a crowd that had come from all the villages around. They called it the Prince's bridge because it looked like the triumph of progress.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 29 April
On 29 April Lapio, a municipality of 1,648 inhabitants in the province of Avellino, celebrates its patron Saint Peter Martyr; the town is known for the Misteri, papier-mâché tableaux of the Passion.
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 Lapio, but an easy day trip away.
