Venticano

The village has died twice and come back with a different name. Destroyed in 1528 in the wars between Angevins and Aragonese and then emptied by plague, it revived under cardinal Cesare Baronio; it was levelled again in 1799 by the French of general Championnet, and of Venticano nothing was left but the mother church and its bell tower. From that bell tower the place took the name Campanarello, which it kept for a century and a half. Only in 1948, when Campanarello, Castello del Lago and Calore broke away from Pietradefusi to form a comune of their own, did the old name come back.

Old it certainly is: the first document dates from 880, when the duke of Benevento granted the monastery of Santa Sofia the goods a certain Gualdrando held at Venticano. Medieval papers write Vetticano, or Castrum Venticani, a settlement already uninhabited in 1394 whose boundaries nobody knows; the name may survive in nearby Dentecane. The ham, on the other hand, comes from geography: Venticano stood on the salt road that linked Naples with the salt pans of Margherita di Savoia, and since the nineteenth century local families have specialised in salting and curing.