Calvi

In the territory lies a place called the Cubante, through which the via Appia ran from Beneventum to Aeclanum: ground made for pitching camp, and almost everyone who came down this way did pitch camp there, from Roger II the Norman in 1129 to the Angevins of the patriarch Vitelleschi in 1437, by way of the emperor Lothair II with pope Innocent II, king Tancred of Sicily and the papal army drawn up against Frederick II. Over the Calore the Ponte Appiano still stands, which everyone calls the broken bridge: the Tabula Peutingeriana marks it as Ad Calorem, its piers are of squared blocks, and it was patched in late antiquity with reused material.

At the Cubante too stands the Casino del Principe, built around 1240 as a hunting lodge for Frederick II, later altered and fortified by the Angevins and used as lodgings by other kings. In 1593 the Spinelli princes bought it and made it their country house: hence its name. In the nineteenth century it declined into a farmstead and after the earthquakes of the twentieth century it was largely abandoned; that it had been Frederick's survived only as village tradition, and was established again as fact between the eighties and nineties. The comune itself is recent: until 1958 Calvi and San Nazzaro were a single comune, called San Nazzaro Calvi and then, from 1949, Calvi San Nazzaro.