Scampitella

Scampitella stands at seven hundred and seventy-five metres on the Apennine watershed, between the Ufita valley and the Calaggio basin, with Apulia beginning just beyond the last field: it borders Anzano di Puglia and Sant'Agata di Puglia. The name seems to come from scampati, the escaped, turned in dialect into scampetelli and Scampetela — and none of the surviving documents says what those who came up here had escaped from. The first paper that names it is of 1187 and speaks of the fief of Contra, on today's territory; on more recent maps the village appears as La Sgambatella, and in the Irpinian dialect it is still called Scampetédde. From the ancient world Roman and pre-Roman finds have come out, among them a milestone of Diocletian's age, and it is probable — so the local sources write, without firm proof — that on these hills stood the Trivici villa that Horace names in the Satires, along the road to Brindisi.

For centuries, however, Scampitella was not a village but a piece of another village: a hamlet of the barony of Vico, then a frazione of Trevico, and so it remained well beyond the abolition of feudal tenure in 1806. It became an autonomous comune only in 1948. In between there is brigandage: between 1861 and 1863 these fields were crossed by the bands of Schiavone and of Lavanga, both of them from Trevico, that is from the village of which Scampitella was a part. The mother church is dedicated to Santa Maria della Consolazione and is the point of reference of a small and recent community, which has less than a century of administrative life behind it and many centuries of somebody else's history.