The name means the stone that defends. In November 774 the Lombard prince Arechis II gave the great court of Montevergine to the female monastery of Santa Sofia in Benevento, and in the diploma the castellum of Petra Sturmina appears as a boundary of the territory: it is the fortified rocky spire around which the first settlement took shape. Sturminare, in medieval Latin, stands for to repel, to push away; hence Petrasturminea and then Pietrastornina. The village is born of the early medieval abandoning of the valley floors, when the inland peoples climbed back towards the ridges, leaving the Roman roads for places easier to defend, and Benevento, capital of the duchy, encouraged the rise of castled settlements to make a crown around it. The rock mattered until at least 1239, the last documentary mention of the castle: it was on the list of the Saved Castles wanted by Frederick II, the castra exempta, garrisons that were to guarantee the presence of the state and that the territories had to maintain.
Then the village moved, and left the rock behind. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the Black Death, Pietrastornina almost disappears from the records; it comes back in the sixteenth century, and it comes back through the monks: the Benedictines of Montevergine founded Santa Maria delle Grazie outside and above via Castello, probably over a religious building of the late thirteenth century, and organised it as a grancia, that is a farm-convent under the rule of ora et labora. The settlement followed the monks uphill. In 1614 the first feudal lords to live in the village, Ugone and Cesare Pagano, built their baronial palace up there by the Piazza, but with the portal aligned on via Castello; and in 1696 the old church of San Giovanni e Bartolomeo, on the by then abandoned crag, was pulled down and rebuilt beyond the San Martino torrent, with the hospital of San Rocco. Around it stood the upper contrade, l'Isca, la Piazza, la Faenzera, l'Airella, il Pianiello, il Monte di Dio, and down in the countryside the scattered casali: Fazi, Rossi, Sacconi, Ragucci, Antonelli, Sellitti, Ciardelli. With one peculiarity: the inhabitants took their surname from the place where they lived, or the place took it from them.
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📅 Every year, on 3 February
On 3 February Pietrastornina, a municipality of 1,568 inhabitants in the province of Avellino, celebrates its patron Saint Blaise; the Castello di Pietrastornina Vecchia is in its territory.
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 Pietrastornina, but an easy day trip away.
