Torella dei Lombardi

The Irpinia earthquake of 1980 left in this comune alone nearly eighteen hundred homeless — fifty-nine per cent of the inhabitants of the time — twenty-four dead and twelve injured. Whoever visits Torella today walks into the castle, which is the town hall and also a museum. It came to be so through a long and winding chain of inheritance: it belonged to the Saraceno until the sixteenth century, then to Alfonso della Rosa, who sold the town to the Caracciolo, who in the seventeenth century obtained the title of princes of Torella and kept their prerogatives until unification; it then passed to a nephew, a Ruspoli, and on his death his widow, Marie Marguerite Blanc, gave it to the comune in 1959. A castle that reached the inhabitants by the decision of a woman who was not from here.

The village appears for the first time in 850 under the name Turrella, little tower, and it was born along a border: the emperor Louis II had settled the dispute over the duchy of Benevento by fixing its limit with the duchy of Salerno on the river Fredane, and along that line fortresses arose on either side. Until 1862 the town was called only Torella; the «dei Lombardi» was added after the unification of Italy, to tell it apart from its namesakes and to recall under which rule it had come into being. In the castle today a small museum keeps original screenplays and film costumes: for here was born Vincenzo Leone, who as a director signed himself Roberto Roberti, father of Sergio Leone; his wife, a silent-film actress, died in this town. Since 2004 a film festival has been held every summer in their memory.