Melizzano appears more than once in a comedy by Eduardo De Filippo, «De Pretore Vincenzo»: it is given as the home town of the protagonist and as a place famous, in antiquity, for its production of apples. The apples are probably a play on the name, which most likely comes instead from the Latin cognomen Melitius, like Melissano in Apulia; but there are those who make the town stand on the site of ancient Melae, a Samnite settlement that had its share of trouble during the Second Punic War. In the Catalogus baronum, in the middle of the twelfth century, the place is called Meliczano and is a fief of the count of Caserta; then it passes to the Signoretto and in 1506 to the Gambacorta.
For centuries Melizzano counted itself in families: forty-eight in 1532, fifty-six in 1596, thirty-eight after the plague of 1656 — a third of the place lost in a year. In 1810 it was joined with Dugenta into a single comune, and in 1943 American bombing killed twenty-one people here. The castle is privately owned and has kept its original physiognomy: the Ghibelline merlons run along the whole building, and in the inner courtyard there are ogival arcades of gothic taste. The church of San Pietro, the parish church, is first mentioned in the sixteenth century, and it was then under the patronage of the Universitas, that is of the community itself; inside it keeps a much venerated sculpture of the Madonna. The territory climbs from thirty metres at its lowest point to a little under a thousand, on the western slopes of the Taburno.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June
On 29 June Melizzano, a municipality of 1,892 inhabitants in the province of Benevento, celebrates its patrons Saint Peter the Apostle and Saint Paul the Apostle.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Melizzano, but an easy day trip away.
