Teora

In piazza Congrega, at Teora, there was a lime tree, and under the lime tree a stone table: two pillars with a slab twenty centimetres thick on top. There the public deeds were drawn up and there the civil rite of marriage was celebrated, in the open and in front of everybody. In what period this was done is not known; what has come down to us is not the date but the words, that is the ritual dialogue the couple recited at the end of the rite. And the village kept to that line: in 1913, at the wish of the mayor Pasquale Luciani, a section of the national free-thought association «Giordano Bruno» opened here, whose centenary was celebrated in 2013.

The church of San Nicola di Mira, on the other hand, has been destroyed four times by earthquakes: in 1604, in 1694, in 1732 and in 1980. When it was first built nobody knows, because all the records burned in a fire in 1690. Of the one that stood until 1980 there remain a spectral fragment of the apse wall, the skeleton of the eighteenth-century high altar and the stone bases of the old columns; what was saved is kept in the new church. Teora was among the places nearest the epicentre of the Irpinia earthquake, and in 2005 it received the gold medal for civil merit. The water, though, has held out: there is the fountain of the mount, called of the dead because the carts going to bury at Conza passed by it, Conza having been designated a blessed necropolis by pope Callixtus II in the twelfth century; and the washhouse fountain of the plain, where the water comes out of five stone masks and where the oldest inscription in Teora stands, dating the rebuilding to 1728.