Cusano Mutri

The name is said to mean cup, and the shape of the place bears it out: the town lies in a basin closed by mountains on the southern side of the Matese, with a single outlet at the gorge of Lavella; from that figure, they say, came also the early ideographic symbol shaped like a Q, the ring of mountains and its one opening. The first certain notice dates from 490, when pope Felix the Third sent a presbyter to officiate in the chapel of the castrum. The earthquake of the fifth of June 1688 destroyed almost every town in the district — Cerreto Sannita was rebuilt lower down — but Cusano took no damage: the people of Cusano, to be prudent, went to sleep in the fields for several months all the same, convinced that the collapse of their own town had merely been postponed. In December 2025 the village joined the most beautiful in Italy.

Inside the town its history is read in the churches. In that of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, the oldest, the feudal lords attended the services from above, through an interior window that opened from the castle; of the castle only a few ruins remain, because the population burned it in 1780, shortly before feudalism was abolished. The church of San Nicola instead became the municipal church, thanks to its position at the centre of the built-up area, so as to end quarrels centuries old between the parish of the upper Terra and that of the lower. In San Giovanni Battista, which has five naves, the baptismal font bears a carved lamb and a horseshoe with the date 1444, and a chiselled silver reliquary of the fourteenth century, enclosed in a leather case, holds a thorn from the crown. The economy was wool: the cloth of Cusano, the pannitti, cost less than that of Cerreto Sannita and was less fine.