Bonea

At the locality of San Biagio, at the foot of the Taburno, there are the remains of a villa where Horace slept. It was the villa of the Cocceius family, a residential complex of the first century before Christ that later passed to the emperor Nerva, and the poet mentions it in the fifth satire of the first book as a stop on the journey he made from Rome to Brindisi. In 1958 the superintendent Amedeo Maiuri directed a season of digging there: structures in opus reticulatum came out, mosaic floors and a marble statue of a satyr with a panther, which is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Then the money ran out, and most of the excavation was covered over again with earth. On the eastern slope of the mountain, instead, the Pizzillo mausoleum still stands, a round Roman funerary monument of the second century after Christ, which here they also call the Tower of the Standard.

The village's name may come from the man who destroyed it: in 833 the settlement was levelled by Buono, duke of Naples. All through the Middle Ages Bonea was not a village but a hamlet of Montesarchio; it belonged to the Carafa between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then to the D'Avalos d'Aquino, who managed its revenues until the abolition of feudalism in 1806. It became an autonomous comune only by a Napoleonic decree of 4 May 1811. Above everything stands the Taburno, which Virgil celebrated in the second Georgic, and on its slopes the wine is made: Bonea is a City of Wine for the falanghina of the Sannio and the aglianico of the Taburno, and one of its cellars has been working since 1779.