Frasso Telesino

The name comes from the ash tree, the Latin fraxinus, and that tree stands in the municipal coat of arms; the addition Telesino, by contrast, is recent, decided at the Unification of Italy to tell the village apart from the other places called Frasso. Popular tradition says it was founded by those who escaped the destruction of Telesia in 1349, but a document of the tenth century names it centuries earlier: the story is younger than the thing it tells. The territory rises from sixty-five metres in the valley to one thousand two hundred and twenty at the peaks, more than eleven hundred metres of range within a single municipality.

The fief had its share of history. In 1496 king Frederick the First of Naples stayed here and signed several decrees in Terra Frassorum; in 1647, during a popular rising, the son of prince Gambacorta was killed, caught up in the revolt of Masaniello. Above the village opens the grotto of San Michele, probably opened to worship by the Lombards, while the church of the Madonna di Campanile was built by princess Giulia Gambacorta for a carved wooden image of the Virgin found among the ruins of a medieval chapel. From Frasso also came Mike Mosiello, a jazz trumpeter in the United States, to whom the village dedicated a plaque in 2003.