Colle Sannita

The name is the hill the old part of the village stands on, but for centuries the name recorded whoever owned it: under the Angevins it was the Casale di Circello, it took the name Colle when the fief passed to the Della Leonessa at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and it became Colle Sannita only in 1862. On the fifteenth of November 1439, while he was besieging it and threatening to wipe it out, Giacomo Caldora — reckoned the most powerful baron in the Kingdom of Naples — died here of a stroke; at Li Piani, where it happened, the villagers built a church to Santa Maria della Libera.

In 1647, during Masaniello's revolt, a hatter from Colle who was living in Naples, surnamed De Blasio, put himself at the head of several hundred rebels and roamed these lands; the neighbouring barons moved against him, he entrenched himself in his own village and there, after a fierce resistance, he was taken and killed with many of his companions. In the early decades of the nineteenth century the place was notorious as a brigands' haunt, and within a few years it changed province three times: Capitanata until 1809, then Campobasso, then Benevento in 1861. Between 1940 and 1943 it was one of the Campanian comuni designated to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment; they were freed when the Allies arrived. The old names of its countryside — Campo Cirelli, Lupi Zoppi, Quaro — are the same that appear on the Tavola Bebiana, found in the Circello countryside in 1832.