Taurasi

The name is Oscan-Sabellic and refers to the bull; the oldest image of the arms is on a capital of 1623, a rampant bull on a field with the words vbertas publica, abundance for all. The epitaph on the sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus records the capture of Taurasia in Samnium, but that Taurasia was not this one: the Ager Taurasinus lay north-east of Benevento, around present-day Circello, where in 180 before Christ the deported Ligurians were settled. The village of today was made by the Lombards, destroyed by the Saracens in 883 and again at the beginning of the following century, and rebuilt by the Normans, who in 1101 gave the castle to Trogisio di Taurasi.

The first document naming the vine of Taurasi is of November 1179, the very years in which the first houses appear: here the wine is as old as the village. The fief passed from baron to baron and came back to the Gesualdo: Carlo Gesualdo, the madrigalist prince who set Torquato Tasso to music and who killed his wife and her lover, spent his childhood here, rebuilt a good part of the town and remembered it even in his will. The plague of 1656 carried off more than half the inhabitants. Today the Aglianico grown here makes the Taurasi, aged three years of which one in chestnut or oak casks, and produced in seventeen comuni of this valley.