Montefusco

The village sits on a hilltop at seven hundred metres, between the country of Avellino and that of Benevento, and its name probably comes from a Lombard lord: mons Fusculi, the mountain of Fusculus. Of the Lombards the ruins of the walls remain; then came the Normans, and Frederick II and Manfred kept the place as a personal castle and lived there for months — Manfred is said to have gathered his army here before the battle of Benevento. But the great thing came later: from 1581 the offices of the Regia Udienza of Principato Ultra were placed at Montefusco, and for more than two centuries a whole province was administered from this village on top of a hill, with its court, its lawyers, its judges and its rural police. The reason was precisely the height: down in the valley lay Benevento, an enclave of the Papal State where the brigands of the Kingdom found asylum and impunity, and one king called it bluntly «petra scandali regni nostri», the stumbling stone of our kingdom. From up here it could be watched.

Then came the French, who found it inconvenient to have a provincial capital you could not climb to in winter: on the eighth of August 1806 the province passed to Avellino, the offices were gone by 1816, and after the offices went the nobles, the lawyers and the priests. The village, which at the beginning of the twentieth century still counted nearly five thousand people, today has little more than a thousand. The building of justice, however, went on being used: its cells became a Bourbon political prison, and for the chambers dug in the rock, the cold and the damp it earned the nickname of «the Spielberg of Irpinia». Through it passed duke Sigismondo Castromediano, baron Nicola Nisco, Carlo Poerio and Michele Pironti, who afterwards wrote down what it had been. There remain the mother church of San Giovanni del Vaglio, of palatine rank — that is, not the archbishop's but the king's — which keeps a relic of the Holy Thorn, the abbey of Santa Maria della Piazza and the church of San Francesco, which tradition holds was founded by the saint himself. And the wine remains: this is where Greco di Tufo is made.