Patron saint festival In 193 days
Saint Mark and the Castello di San Barbato
📅 Every year, on 25 April
Manocalzati celebrates Saint Mark on 25 April, in the church dedicated to him.
Manocalzati has 3,234 inhabitants in the Sabato valley, in the basin of Avellino. There is a hand in the town's name and on its coat of arms, and not even here do they agree on which one: the blazon describes an open left hand, while the town's own statute speaks of the palm of a gloved hand, the right. In the hamlet of San Barbato stands the castle, founded by the Lombards and mentioned for the first time in a parchment of 1146 kept at Montevergine, which tells of a meeting between the lord of the nearby castle and the lord of San Barbato to settle a question of boundaries. Today it has the look of an Aragonese fortress, with one oddity: the two towers to the south are round and scarped, while those to the north are pointed in plan.
The most surprising thing, however, is underground, and it was found by accident. In 1964, while a well was being drilled for the new elementary school, the workmen broke into a Roman air shaft some forty metres deep: below it ran a tunnel of over two hundred metres, one branch towards the river Sabato and one towards Valle Chiusa. The roof is made of pairs of tiles leaned together to form a right angle, held by iron nails, and every tile carries the stamp of the works that made it. The earthquake of 1980, on the other hand, left its mark on the surface: two dead, the castle tower collapsed and three hundred and twenty-one people left homeless out of little more than two thousand five hundred.
The Manocalzati guide
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Manocalzati 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Manocalzati
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Manocalzati, but an easy day trip away.
chiesa dei Santi Gervasio e Protasio 📍 Belluno · 12 km A thirteenth-century church in Belluno divided in two by a wall, between the faithful and the enclosed nuns. basilica cattedrale di San Martino 📍 Belluno · 14 km Belluno's cathedral, rebuilt by Tullio Lombardo in the sixteenth century, with Juvarra's bell tower. chiesa di San Rocco 📍 Belluno · 14 km Belluno's votive church, born of the plague of 1530, in Castellavazzo stone, with a canvas by Gaspare Diziani. chiesa di Santo Stefano 📍 Belluno · 14 km The Servites' Gothic church in Belluno, in white and red stone, with Brustolon's angels and a 24-hour clock. chiesa di Sant'Aronne 📍 Belluno · 16 km The parish church of Cusighe, in Belluno, with an altarpiece by Girolamo Denti and a Last Supper by Paris Bordon. chiesa di San Liberale 📍 Belluno · 16 km A very old little church on the hill of Pedeserva, in Belluno, with a stone-slab roof and a crypt.