Dugenta

Three explanations compete for the name: duae gentes, the alliance between Romans and Samnites struck in these parts; the roughly two hundred inhabitants the village is said to have had at first; or the Roman centuriation. When Charles I of Anjou gave the place to Guglielmo di Belmonte in the thirteenth century it was valued at a little more than forty-two ounces, and the first Angevin tax register counted twenty-three taxed households in it. In 1648 the Duke of Guise, caught while fleeing Naples, was shut up in the castle above the village.

The finest story here, though, is that of its independence. Attached to Melizzano in 1810, in 1859 it tried to break away with a petition signed by twenty-eight landowners: nothing came of it. It tried again in 1949, with a request to the Ministry of the Interior signed by seven hundred and fifty citizens, listing the reasons — the hamlet had the means to run its own public services, the parent town was eleven kilometres away one way, and there were smaller comuni in the province — and pledging five hundred thousand lire of their own money for the initial costs. Dugenta became an autonomous comune in 1956.