Foiano di Val Fortore

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whoever had to cross the wood of Mazzocca made his will first. The bands of brigands who came from Foggia worked it continually, and the Benedictine monastery that stood up there, in the district of San Giovanni a Mazzocca on Monte San Marco, was the object of robberies and assaults. That monastery had risen beside a church perhaps of the seventh century, dedicated to the blessed John the Hermit, which in its turn stood on the ruins of a temple to Pollux. In feudal times these mountains were famous for game, and the monks exacted heavy dues there: whoever killed a deer had to hand them the right haunch, whoever a boar, the shoulder. At the end of the eighteenth century the wood passed to the duke of Molinara, who cleared it up and divided it into shares among the citizens of Foiano, who held common rights over it.

The name, in the beginning, was Fuganum, which suggests a Roman praedium, peopled probably from the inhabitants of San Firmiano, Vasto, San Biase, San Donato and Renzicoppa, where the ruins of old Roman farms can still be seen; and perhaps before that there was the Irpinian tribe of the Vescellani, the one Pliny mentions. The village has changed masters and provinces more than once: from 1607 it lay under the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the Jesuits of Benevento, who held it until their suppression in 1773; until 1811 it belonged to the Capitanata, then it passed to the district of Campobasso, in Molise, and stayed there until 1861, when it finally became part of Benevento. Among its feudal lords, the one who left the worst name is Ottavio Carafa, buried in the church of the Madonna delle Grazie at Baselice: the people here still believe that when God wants to punish the two villages for their sins, he will send them a descendant of that man.