Morcone climbs a hillside like a fan, with the ruins of the castle at the top. Its walls are attested as early as 1054 and had six gates, and those six gates gave their names to the six administrative districts of the Universitas, each gathered around its own parish church: of them all only Porta San Marco is left, the others pulled down over time to widen the approach roads. The castle rests on a Samnite settlement: the lower part of its base is made of the polygonal blocks of a fortified enclosure of the fifth or fourth century before Christ. And the church of San Salvatore stands over a temple of the Hellenistic age, as the isodomic masonry found beneath its floor has shown; for about a century, from 1058, it was a bishop's seat.
What this place was called before the Lombards nobody knows: it appears for the first time in a document of 776, when it was the seat of a gastaldate. On the coat of arms there is a lion, and the lion is there because Livy called Murgantia a validam urbem, a strong city: Morcone claims that ancient name for itself, while a soberer explanation derives its own from the mountain above it. Roger II made it royal property and gave it municipal statutes, the Antique Assisie, which Margherita di Durazzo confirmed in 1381. And in 1861, when the borders of united Italy were being drawn, Morcone agreed to detach itself from the province of Molise and join the new province of Benevento: flattered, as the sources put it, by promises of territorial and administrative advantages.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 20 May; the second half of September brings the Morcone Fair
Morcone celebrates Saint Bernardino of Siena on 20 May. In the second half of September, the Morcone Fair is held, on an exhibition area of about 40,000 square metres dedicated to agriculture, crafts and gastronomy.
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.
