Molinara

In 1663 duke Francesco Muscettola obtained from the Royal Chamber of the Sommaria permission to change the name of his own fief: Molinara was to become Spezzano. Fourteen years later he had the rest authorised too, namely that his title of duke of Spezzano should no longer refer to the Calabrian fief but to this village in the Samnium. On paper, in short, the village was renamed after a place that lay somewhere else, to make a lord's title fit. It did not take: the people never wanted the name Spezzano, and as soon as they could they went back to the old one. It is the only case, in a very long chain of masters — the Capua, the de Minadois, the Caracciolo, the Carafa, and finally the Muscettola, who actually lived here for more than a century — in which the feudal lord tried to lay hands not on the land but on the name, and lost.

The real name, in any case, is not certain: some derive it from the many watermills, some from the stonecutters who supplied millstones to all the villages around, some from a Castello Montis Hilarii that appears in a document of 1118, some from the sacred olive of the Greeks, looking at the olive groves that surround the village. The first sure mention is of 992, in a list of goods confirmed to the abbot of San Modesto of Benevento, where a church of Santa Maria at Molinara appears; and the founding of the village is linked to the arrival of Byzantine monks, who built here the church of Santa Maria dei Greci and drew in the surrounding populations, who gathered into a castle for protection. The result can still be seen: on the top of the hill, at five hundred and ninety-two metres, the Rione Terra is a pentagon of walls with a round tower at every corner and a square lookout tower halfway along the longest side, with fan-shaped streets and houses of limestone. Today it is empty: the earthquake of 1962 and then that of 1980 caused the fortified old centre to be abandoned.