Mercogliano

On the arms of this Catholic town there is a pagan god. The name seems to come from Mercurianum, which some scholars take to mean the praedia, the estates, of the magistri mercuriales: the magistrates, mostly freedmen, who administered the cult of Mercury. And Mercury is still there, on the municipal arms, filling the whole height of the shield, with the winged petasus, the caduceus in his right hand and the winged sandals on his feet, above the sea. It was not always so: a seal of 1809 shows a divided shield, with the emblem of the abbey of Montevergine on one side and the god on the other; in the seal of 1900 only Mercury is left, running over three mounts. The medieval name of the place, for that matter, was Castrum Mercuriani.

Mercogliano was born of a group of refugees. In the last decades of the sixth century, to escape the Lombards who had come down into the south, a colony of people from nearby Abellinum occupied this hill, and in a short time the settlement formed and filled up. The village appears for the first time in a document of 982, still as a casale of Avellino; between 1077 and 1089 it was raised to the rank of castle and at last obtained administrative autonomy. In 1137 Roger II besieged it, took its castle and shut up in it Matilde, the wife of count Rainulfo. Much later, between 1940 and 1943, Mercogliano was one of the Campanian comuni designated by the fascist authorities to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment: the two sisters of Romanian origin held here were freed with the arrival of the Allied army, in September 1943. Above the town stands Montevergine, which a funicular reaches in seven minutes.