The name of Mugnano is traced back to Jupiter Ammon, to whom a temple on the Litto hill was probably dedicated, and the village grew from the welding together of several settlements of different origins and ages; the first documented notice is from 1135 and lies in a parchment of the archive of Montevergine. The second name, the one that tells it apart from all the other Mugnanos in Italy, came much later. And the village's fame in the world came later still, all at once, on a day in 1805, when a case that had come from Rome was carried in along the road that leads from Irpinia to Nola.
Inside were the bones of a girl taken from a catacomb, together with a phial of blood. A priest born here in 1772, Francesco De Lucia, had obtained them from pope Pius VII; the custodian who examined them declared that the girl must have been between thirteen and fourteen years old. Of her the name is known, Filomena, and in practice nothing else. Around those relics has grown the principal sanctuary in the world dedicated to the saint, made out of a seventeenth-century church of the Madonna delle Grazie, with two identical bell towers that look down on the road. She is invoked by the young, by women in childbirth and by prisoners, and her feast falls on 11 August.
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📅 Every year, on 2 July, with the memory of Antonio Settembre
Mugnano del Cardinale celebrates Mary Most Holy of Grace on 2 July. Every year during the town feast, a commemoration is held in honour of Antonio Settembre, with a procession recalling his deeds.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Mugnano del Cardinale, but an easy day trip away.
