Vallata

The village sits on a hill at 870 metres, astride the valley of the Ufita and that of the Calaggio, in the part of Irpinia called the Baronia; the name comes from there, from the two valleys, or else from the lower ground where the first houses stood. It appears early in the documents: in 1111 there is mention of a Ruggero da Vallata, and stretches of wall confirm that the settlement is old. In the church of San Vito, at the southern end of the village, they keep a statue that never goes out in procession: the fear is that the saint would answer with a storm of stones, and so a half-bust taken from the mother church is carried instead.

On the hill of Santa Maria, by contrast, the church was wanted by the people. In the nineteen-thirties, after a crucifix and a fifteenth-century painting of the Madonna had been found on the hill — following, tradition says, directions the Virgin had given in a dream to one Giovanni Antonio Crincoli — a building went up that was then left abandoned for decades. Since the late nineteen-nineties a citizens' committee has rebuilt it, and the work has been paid for entirely out of the food festivals and concerts held up there in summer. In the mother church, meanwhile, above the high altar, hangs a Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew attributed to Lanfranco.