Parolise

Parolise stands on a hill between the valleys of the Sabato and the Calore, a few kilometres from Avellino, and is one of the comuni where the grapes for Fiano are grown. The name may come from a praedium Paulisium, the estate of one Paulisius, and thus from the Greek Paulision; others derive it from padule, a garden plot. It first appears in writing in the bull of pope Celestine III of 4 November 1197, listing the possessions of the abbey of Montevergine: it tells us the territory existed and what it was called, not that anyone lived there.

In 2013 the comune discovered that for decades it had been using a coat of arms registered nowhere at all. The heraldic office searched the State Archives of Avellino, Naples and Genoa, and in two documents of 1763 and 1811 found an inked stamp bearing the old arms: the village took them back, and the colours of the new gonfalon were chosen by the primary school children. Of the feudal past there remain the palaces of the Lombardi, Rotondi-De Rienzi and Nazzaro-Cavallo families with their eighteenth-century courtyards, and the clock tower that began as a watchtower; and there was a shoe factory, the Scorta works, which made shoes for the nobility of the South and boots for the army during the Second World War.