Castelvetere in Val Fortore

The village stands at a little more than seven hundred metres, on the top of a height in the upper Fortore valley, a step away from Molise and almost the same distance from Benevento and from Campobasso. The name says what was here: Castelli veteris, the old castle, and under that name it appears for the first time in the Catalogus baronum, in the twelfth century, although the settlement is probably older. Of the castle very little remains: a few scraps of the old round Norman tower, around which the oldest core of the houses still turns. What happened here instead, and cannot be seen, is a dance of borders: until 1811 Castelvetere belonged to the Capitanata, that is to Apulia; with the Napoleonic reform it passed to the newborn province of Campobasso, in Molise; and when in 1861 Benevento became a province, the comune was joined to it. Three regions in fifty years without moving a metre.

The list of masters is just as restless. Under the Normans half the fief belonged to count Philip of Civitate, the other half to two men named Novellone and Arabito; then it passed to the de Molisio family, to the Aragonese, and at last to the Carafa, who lost it when Charles V, by a diploma of the thirtieth of June 1532, punished the rebellion of Alberico II and gave Castelvetere to don Ferrante Gonzaga. A few years later the Carafa got it back from Gonzaga himself, and in 1613 Isabella Carafa sold it to Cesare Brancaccio; from there it went to the Ridolfi, the Grasso, the Sersale, until in 1689 Nicola Moscatelli bought it, and in 1693 obtained the title of marquis. The eighteenth-century marquis palace, declared a national monument, belongs to the Moscatelli and is the most imposing building in the village. Then there is the finely carved portal on the flank of the church of San Nicola, on the main street; the public garden, with allegorical statues and the mosaics of the constellations of the zodiac; and to the north-west the communal wood, of turkey oaks, owls, little owls, short-toed eagles and porcini.