Volturara Irpina

Volturara Irpina has 3,401 inhabitants at the foot of Monte Terminio, and its territory climbs from the 667 metres of the Piana del Dragone up to the summit, twelve hundred metres higher. The water here does something strange: it comes down from the peaks and then vanishes, swallowed by cavities the village calls ventare, only to surface lower down in springs that all have names — the Acqua Mieroli, the Acqua di Zia Maria, the Acqua delle Noci. Above a thousand metres the snow lies for ninety to a hundred and twenty days, and melting slowly it recharges the whole system.

People go mushrooming in these woods, and gatherers come to Volturara from all over Campania: here the porcini are called sìrolo. The chestnut groves are all privately owned and the chestnuts are still processed at home, a little at a time. The Irpinia earthquake of 1980 left 5 dead, 107 injured and 523 homeless in this comune alone; many people of Volturara have worked in building ever since. And the village has emptied out: in 1951 there were five thousand of them.