Bucciano

Until 1991 Bucciano bore on its coat of arms its own village destroyed and wrapped in flames. It was the memory of 1460, when the place, then a fief of the Carafa, was besieged and put to fire and sword by King Ferdinand. With the decree of the twenty-seventh of December 1991 the comune adopted new arms: a golden B on red, a building with a bell tower, an olive tree laden with eleven fruits and two eight-rayed stars. In practice it stopped depicting itself as it burned. Before the abolition of feudalism, moreover, it had never been a comune at all: it was always a casale of Airola, so much so that people called it Airola-Bucciano, and only then did it begin to stand on its own.

The oldest spelling was Gucciano, or Cucciano, and it seems to come from a Roman estate, the praedium Coccejanum: the villa of that Cocceius at whose inns, above Caudium, Horace stopped on his way to Brindisi. A Roman stone bearing the name Cuccejanus did exist, and has been lost. Through the territory runs a stretch of the Caroline aqueduct, the work with which Vanvitelli brought the springs of the Fizzo to the royal palace of Caserta, today on the world heritage list. On the slopes of the Taburno stands the sanctuary of the Madonna, built in the fifteenth century after a deaf and mute shepherd girl was said to have been healed on finding a statue of the Virgin in a cave; Dominican friars kept a convent there from 1498 to 1743, then came abandonment and partial repairs. And Bucciano is inside a song: in 1975 the band Napoli Centrale put on their first record a piece named after the people of Bucciano, making the village the image of all the small farming towns of the South and of an emigration that promised what then never arrived.