Moschiano

On the arms of Moschiano there is a monument that no longer exists: the fountain known as Le Fontane, demolished in 1961. The village chose to keep precisely that on its shield, with everything that stood on it — two coats of arms, one with the three carafes of the Pignatelli and a tower of three tiers, the other with wooded mountains and the word MVSCANO — and with the two stone tablets that stood between them. The first bears a Latin inscription which, instead of giving the year of the works, makes you guess it: if you ask when, it says, take four away from a thousand and six hundred. Whoever had it made signed himself Leo. It is a fountain that introduces itself with a riddle, and it is the only image of itself that remains.

Nor is it the only coat of arms the comune has used: in recent times another was in use, with a wolf issuing from the partition line and, on the other side, three cypresses beneath a golden sun — very similar, to tell the truth, to the arms of the comune of Savignano Irpino. The name, for its part, turns up in administrative documents from the thirteenth century in four different forms: Musclano, Moscano, Muschiano and Muscano civitatis Lauri, where the last part says everything. Moschiano is one of the seven comuni of the Vallo di Lauro and was a hamlet of the State of Lauro, so it depended on the lords of that fief until 1806, when the Napoleonic reforms abolished feudalism. With unification, the royal decree of 17 February 1861 assigned it, with the other villages of the Vallo, to the province of Avellino, even though the roads from here lead more easily towards the Neapolitan side: a village that lies in one province and looks towards another. It lives off centuries-old woods — chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, timber and cattle — and its most heartfelt feast is carnival, in the week of Shrove Tuesday.