Montefalcone di Val Fortore

The castle of Montefalcone had a rhomboid plan, a courtyard with a wide, deep cistern for storing rainwater during sieges and, from the courtyard, two tunnels about two kilometres long each, which served as escape routes. It was built to hold out, and hold out it did: in 1349 and again in 1805 two earthquakes badly damaged it, and both times it was quickly repaired. What finished it was not the earth but a decision: in 1809 it was razed to the ground because it had become a refuge for bandits. Today only a few ruins remain of the mighty stronghold, and the old centre — which has kept its medieval layout despite the earthquakes of 1962 and 1980 — turns around it as though it were still there.

Montefalcone is the highest comune in the province of Benevento, on the eastern slope of a limestone hill at the border with Puglia, and from up there one can see as far as the mountains of Abruzzo and Basilicata; at Trivolicchio, inside the communal territory, the river Fortore rises. It appears in documents in the Norman age as Mons Falconis, from the Falcone house which first held the fief, and in 1439 the castle played host to king Alfonso of Aragon. The second name is administrative instead: on 22 January 1863 a royal decree added «di Val Fortore» to distinguish it from the other Montefalcone scattered across Italy. A village of little more than a thousand people keeps two museums open: the museum of peasant civilisation, of 1982, with about three thousand objects gathered in thirteen rooms, and the civic museum, whose palaeontological section holds thousands of fossils collected by professor Luigi Capasso, some from the basin of Pietraroja, the one that gave the baby dinosaur. On the ridges, meanwhile, a large wind farm has been turning since the nineties: the highest village in the province has ended up selling the wind.