Santo Stefano del Sole

This town was born to shorten the journey. Around the year one thousand the Serpiceti, who lived by grazing and farming, came down every day from Serpico to work the lands watered by the Futo and the Sabato, and every evening walked several kilometres back to get home. At a certain point they decided it was better to build their houses closer to the fields, and they built them here. When he realised that a settlement was really taking shape, the feudal lord of Serpico built himself a palace among them too. The first document naming Santo Stefano del Sole is of 1045, in a diploma kept in the archive of Santa Sofia at Benevento. Serpico, for its part, was wholly emptied in 1469 by the plague that struck Europe: the survivors divided between the new centre of Sorbo Serpico and this town. From 1525 Santo Stefano, until then joined to Sorbo, had a mayor of its own.

In the mother church, on piazza del Sole, the floor had three stone slabs closing three tombs, and each was for a category of the dead: the one near the high altar for the brethren of the Rosary, the central one for the poor, the one nearest the exit for those who had died a violent death. The nave was built between 1600 and 1605, the crossing a century later. In front of the church, the earth dug out to level the parvis formed an embankment that is today the floor of the square, and there four lime trees were planted to celebrate the Napoleonic victories of the Italian campaign: three are still standing. The hardest fact, though, is of 1809: on the third of August the brigand Lorenzo de Feo, known as Laurenziello, came into the town with his band and killed more than thirty people, among them the mayor. Captured two years later, he was hanged at Avellino in 1812.