Ginestra degli Schiavoni

The first settlement stood along the via Minucia, which ran from Benevento to Troia. Then, at the beginning of the second century, the emperor Trajan had a new road built and took it down into the valley: the village was left off it, and from then on it counted for less. The name appears in documents around 1100, and it is the name of the plant that covered the land, the broom.

The second half of the name tells another story: in the middle of the fifteenth century Ginestra was uninhabited, and it was repopulated — so it is believed — by Slavs from Dalmatia, which was then called Schiavonia. Very little survives from before: the oldest piece of evidence in the village is a bell of 1690, in the chapel outside the walls, beside the drove roads along which flocks went down to winter in Apulia. Today Ginestra has wind farms and a museum of renewable energy.