Melito Irpino

Melito Irpino is a town that was moved. The old borgo stood on the river Ufita, clinging around its castle; after the earthquake of August 1962 it emptied fast, and after the one of November 1980 it was razed to the ground for reasons of safety. Two pieces only are left standing, the castle and the church of Sant'Egidio: they are what remains of a ghost town, and even the line of the streets has been lost, except where the basalt and the cobbles had already been laid. The decision was taken step by step: the Ministry of Public Works sent a geologist of the Italian Geological Service, Alvaro Valdinucci, who came twice; the first time he ruled out the area the council itself proposed, the second he concluded that rebuilding on the spot was not advisable at all. The transfer to the place called Le Starze, two kilometres further east, was ratified by ministerial decree in 1964; the move began at the end of the sixties and finished in the second half of the seventies, while the demolitions, carried out on behalf of the council, ended in 1988.

The reason is a list. Before the two earthquakes that closed it, old Melito had taken others, with the regularity of a calendar, in the fifteenth century, twice between the seventeenth and the eighteenth and again in the twentieth; there was the flood that swept away the iron bridge and tore out the mills along the river, there were repeated landslides, an invasion of locusts in the sixteen hundreds and three plagues. Under all this there is something much older: in 1880, a kilometre from the old centre, Roman tombs came to light set out in parallel rows, a large bath building, two small temples, an aqueduct ending in a basin, lead pipes with a Samnite stamp and a statuette showing a wolf embracing a tree. Some think it was Meles, the Samnite town that Livy says was destroyed in 215 BC, when the Romans defeated the three thousand men Hannibal had left there and gave the whole booty to their legionaries.