Montemarano

Montemarano has 3,005 inhabitants in Irpinia, on a height above the Calore valley. Tradition, resting on a passage of Appian of Alexandria, has it founded by the Samnite general Marius Egnatius, the one who managed to beat the Romans in these parts. What is certain is that from 1059 it was a bishop's see, and remained one for almost eight centuries, until the diocese was suppressed in the nineteenth century. But the most surprising thing is at Assisi: in Giotto's fresco cycle in the upper basilica, among the episodes of the life of Saint Francis, there is one entitled "the dead woman of Montemarano", recording the miracle of a woman of this village whom, tradition says, the saint brought back to life.

The town is also known for its carnival and for the tarantella montemaranese, which has an ethnomusical museum of its own. Then there is a less cheerful story: between 1940 and 1943 Montemarano was one of the Campanian comuni chosen by the Fascist authorities for the civil internment of Jewish refugees. At least six arrived, among them a family with a teenage daughter, and they were all freed in September 1943, when the Allies came. The earthquake of 1980, finally, left the mother church unsafe: the works took twelve years, and it reopened in 1991.