Monteforte Irpino

The town takes its name from its castle, which was probably a Roman castrum before becoming a true fortress, built in all likelihood by the Lombards; from the year 891 Monteforte appears regularly in official documents. In the Angevin age the fief passed to the princes of Montfort, and here lived that Guy de Montfort who on 25 May 1270 murdered Henry of Cornwall in the church of San Silvestro at Viterbo, in the middle of a service: one of the most sensational crimes of the European thirteenth century. Later the fief belonged to the Orsini, last counts of Nola, who lost it for having rebelled against Charles V. On the hill of San Martino, inside a pine wood, there remain perimeter walls of rough stone, a tower on a circular plan and a worked fireplace; beside them stands the church of San Martino, which in its original layout goes back to the thirteenth century and keeps the coffered wooden ceiling and the majolica floor.

In 1799 the French set a detachment here and from here moved to attack Mercogliano and Avellino; and in the Carbonari risings that started from Nola on the first of July 1820 Monteforte was a protagonist, because it was the insurgents following Michele Morelli who raised there the flag of liberty against the Bourbons. Much later, after Italy entered the war in June 1940, the fascist regime set up a detention camp in the town, in the premises of a former orphanage in the middle of a residential area: the internees were Italian opponents and antifascists, often with long prison sentences already served behind them. The camp was dissolved only at the end of the summer of 1943. The comune's coat of arms, instead, comes from the Benedictines: the hills represent the three monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and originally the cross was flanked by the letters M and F, the initials of Montis Fortis.