Campoli del Monte Taburno

Campoli was born of an earthquake. In medieval diplomas the place is Campora, and in the fourteenth century it appears as a casale in the State of Vitulano, in the province of Principato Ultra; but the settlement proper, the source says, takes shape after the earthquake of 1456, when the people of the contrada Sala of Cacciano, then a casale of Tocco, gathered together at the place called Campora. To Cacciano, though, they stayed tied for a long time: until 1700, when the church of San Nicola was built, they were registered there and went there for the rites, and even in the nineteen-seventies the children went down to Cacciano for middle school. Under the Aragonese the village belonged to the Della Leonessa, then passed to the Carafa, the D'Avalos and at last the D'Aquino.

A local saying makes fun of the place, and it is right twice over. The old centre stands around a spur of rock, the Riella, and is so small that they say it has one vegetable garden and one vine; and its only church has no real bell tower and no bells, because the chimes come out of loudspeakers, which now and then screeched as well. The arms, on the other hand, were explained in writing: choosing them in March 1958, the town council gave as its reason that they went back «to ancestral traditions and to the majesty of the Taburno, which the comune of Campoli sets in the splendid green of its corolla». All around are vines and olive groves: this is the country of Aglianico del Taburno and Falanghina del Sannio, and on the night of San Lorenzo the village holds Calici di stelle.