Castelpagano

On the square, at the foot of the feudal palace, there is a column. Alfonso Meomartini held it to be a pillory column, and out of that reading a modern legend was born, hard to root out and without any documentation at all: that the guilty of certain faults were tied there to be exposed to public infamy. At the top of the pillar, meanwhile, is the coat of arms of the old Universitas, with a steelyard in the field and the date 1608. Of the village before the Norman conquest nothing certain is known: the «pagano» of the name might come from some pagan outpost surviving hereabouts, but that too is a guess. In the Norman age the fief went first to the county of Buonalbergo and then to that of Civitate; with the Angevins it passed to the Burgundian De Caude, then to the Del Balzo, who held it until 1624, and at last to the Brancia, the Mormile and the Capecelatro, dukes of Castelpagano with seniority from 1724.

The entry on Castelpagano has a rare thing in it: the counts. At the census ordered by Charles V in 1532 the village had seventy-four families; in 1595 they were a hundred and sixty-eight; after the famine between 1646 and 1647 they fell to a hundred and forty, and in 1669 to a hundred and twenty-nine; then from 1766 the figures climb again, and in a little over twenty years, by 1789, the inhabitants grow by half. The rule beneath those numbers is written by the source itself: the population rose in times of peace and without plague, famine or earthquakes, and fell when those calamities came down on people's heads. The village shifted its allegiance too: first it lay in the Capitanata, then it was joined to the contado of Molise, and in 1861, with the unification, it passed to the newborn province of Benevento. In the woods of turkey oak and pedunculate oak around, what is left of the forest that ran from the Tammaro to the Fortore, a prehistoric axe from the passage between palaeolithic and neolithic came to light in the first decades of the twentieth century.