Santa Paolina

The first document that speaks of this hill is a memorial of the Lombard abbey of Santa Sofia of Benevento, of the year 1041: the site is described in it as a promised land, set at the end of a path, at the foot of a wood and near a spring, and the whole of it depended directly on the abbey. The name Santa Paolina appears for the first time in a source of 1083, and in an inventory of the same abbey, around 1270, the village is recorded as Castrum vetus Sancte Pauline, the old castle. Much earlier still, at the foot of monte San Felice, in the valley watered by the Orsi, Sant'Egidio, Marotta and Picoli streams, an Irpinian people lived settled who in the ninth century before Christ made decorated pottery; and the fragments of a large kiln tell that objects went out from here as early as the late Neolithic, to end up along the trade routes of the interior.

The land, promised or not, has kept its word in wine: the first parchment documenting the cultivation of the vine here is of 1168 and points to a place between Viturano and Montaperto. Today this is Greco di Tufo and Aglianico country, although intensive planting arrived only in the nineteen-sixties. Beside the fields there was lace-making on the pillow, women's work and above all the work of the poorest households, which brought an extra earning into the house; and there was clay, with the pottery works in the Crete district. The comune is not one village but a mosaic of districts with names of their own: the court of Brecciale, the rock of Petrarola, Casale Santa Lucia, Piana de' Sauri, Casale Castelmozzo, Taverna della Figura. In 1951 the inhabitants were nearly two thousand five hundred: today they are little more than half.