Durazzano

The village appears in the documents in the fourteenth century as Oraczanum, in the justiciarate of Terra di Lavoro and in the county of Caserta, whose feudal fortunes it followed — and it followed them at a run. Under the Angevins it was enfeoffed to the Sus, then it passed to a surgeon, Pasquale De Parma, and after him to the Ciciniello, the Della Ratta, the Caracciolo, the Spinelli, the D'Aquino, the Carafa, the Tomacelli and the Loffredo: the arms of the Della Ratta are still carved on the door of the four-towered medieval castle. In 1749 Durazzano became royal land and was never enfeoffed again. Shortly before, in 1647, the wave of Masaniello's revolution had reached it: the feudal yoke was shaken off and the baron's treasurer was killed, but the killers fell into the hands of the viceregal soldiery and were hanged. Once, moreover, Durazzano formed a single comune with Cervino and with Forchia, which today lie in another province.

Through the territory runs the Ponte della Valle, the second bridge of the Carolino aqueduct: this is the work that brings water to the cascade of the Royal Palace of Caserta, inscribed on the UNESCO world heritage list. A piece of the great eighteenth-century aqueduct, that is, stands in a village of two thousand people. Two and a half centuries later the valley has been crossed by infrastructure of another kind: since October 2005 there have been seven wind turbines here, fourteen megawatts in all. Until 1970 the comune also had a railway halt of its own, that of Cervino-Durazzano, and today the nearest station is at Santa Maria a Vico, on the same line. In 2019, finally, Durazzano hosted the clay shooting events of the Naples Universiade.