Cerreto Sannita

This town is a design. The earthquake of 5 June 1688 completely destroyed the old Cerreto; Marino Carafa, the count's brother, arrived a few days later with doctors and provisions, dug with his own hands among the rubble and, having consulted several engineers, decided not to rebuild where it stood but further down, on more stable ground. The new Cerreto was laid out on a regular plan by Giovanni Battista Manni, and it is the town one walks through today. Another earthquake, that of 1349, had done something stranger to a neighbour: it had opened suffocating mofettes in the soil of Telesia, and the survivors moved to Cerreto and the nearby towns. The bishops left too, and wandered the diocese for two centuries before finding a settled seat here.

There are two trades. Clay has been worked here for a very long time: near the rock called the Leonessa a Neolithic ceramic kiln has been found, and the clay came from the banks of the Titerno; the ceramics of Cerreto are still what the town is known for. The other trade was wool: the rich families and the confraternities owned thousands of head of livestock, which every winter went down to Puglia along the transhumance tracks, and a local historian puts the total at two hundred thousand head. In 1737 the town rebelled against the Carafa counts, worn out by their police regime and by the taxes that were strangling the cloth industry; the Carafa sent a hundred and twenty mercenaries, and it took the intervention of king Charles of Bourbon to restore legality. The people of Cerreto won in court, but the wool was finished by then.