Casalduni

On 11 August 1861 lieutenant Cesare Augusto Bracci, with forty soldiers and four carabinieri, was on reconnaissance at Pontelandolfo, in the fight against the brigandage that broke out after unification. Finding himself threatened by a group of brigands and armed peasants, he tried to reach San Lupo, where the headquarters were; but the road was blocked, and so the column fell back on Casalduni. Here the soldiers were surrounded, taken and killed by order of the brigand Angelo Pica: forty-five men in all. In the following days came the army's reprisal, which set fire to the built-up area of Casalduni and to that of Pontelandolfo, where several civilians were killed too. These are the events still remembered of these two villages, and about which the sources do not all tell the same story.

Before and after, Casalduni has been above all countryside. The name says what it was: a casale, that is, inhabited land but without much autonomy, belonging to churches or monasteries; it appears for the first time as Castrum Casaldonis in a papal bull of the fourteenth century fixing the bounds of the territory of Benevento. The village lies on the slope of Monte Cicco, on the right of the Tammaro, and with its twenty-three quarters it is one of the comuni of the province with the widest rural extent; near the locality of Terravecchia, in the middle of the wood, the Alenta stream makes waterfalls. Between the nineteenth century and the early twentieth the inhabitants were more than three thousand and the village counted for trade and for its fairs. Then came the earthquakes: that of 1688, that of 1962 and that of 1980. In July they run the palio Castrum Casaldonis.