Ospedaletto d'Alpinolo

The village takes its name from a hospital: the one belonging to the abbey of Montevergine, already there in the twelfth century and rebuilt in 1296, which is why they called it the new hospital. Around that hospital the people moved, leaving the old hamlet gathered about the church of Santa Maria del Preposito, and from there comes Ospedaletto; the second half of the name was added after the unification of Italy, to tell it apart from the other villages of the same name. Through here runs the road that climbs to Montevergine, and on that road two chapels mark out the pilgrimage. The first is the Scalzatoio, of the twelfth century, and it is called that because there the pilgrims took off their shoes to do the mountain barefoot. The second is the chapel of the Misura, where a stone shaped like a chair marks, so the legend says, the point at which the Madonna stopped on her way up: every pilgrim sits on it before setting off again. On another stone there is the print of a foot, and an inscription promising a thousand years of indulgence to whoever says a pater noster and kisses it.

Between 1940 and 1943 Ospedaletto was one of the Campanian comuni designated by the fascist authorities to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment, and among the villages of the province of Avellino it was the one that took in the most: eighteen people, most of them from Poland and Austria. They were all freed with the arrival of the Allied army, in September 1943, except one. Isidoro Gruner died by suicide here on the sixth of August 1941, during his forced residence. As for the rest of the village: the mother church of Saints Philip and James goes back to 1404 and has been redone more than once, after the earthquake of 1805 and again after that of 1980, which brought down its apse; and the little church of the hamlet of Casale collapsed twice and was twice rebuilt, then in the nineteen fifties was demolished to widen a road, and reopened only after the turn of the century, when the people had been asking for it for half a century. Ospedaletto is known for its nougat, which here is called cupeto, and for the September pilgrimage that climbs to Montevergine by night, on foot.