Pannarano

Pannarano belongs to the province of Benevento, but the province of Benevento does not touch it: every one of the comuni it borders — Avella, Pietrastornina, Roccabascerana, San Martino Valle Caudina, Sperone, Summonte — lies in the province of Avellino. It is an enclave, that is, a piece of one province entirely surrounded by another. The territory is small, less than twelve square kilometres, and yet it climbs from a little over two hundred metres to nearly sixteen hundred: almost fourteen hundred metres of difference. The reason for the anomaly lies in administrative history: the village was part of the Principato Ultra, whose head was first Montefusco and then Avellino, and only after the unification of Italy was it aggregated to the province of Benevento. Even the railway station that serves it is in another comune, San Martino Valle Caudina.

The first documentary mention is in a cedolario of the ninth of October 1296, where one reads of the casale of Pandarano; a document names as its feudatory one Bartolomeo da Montesarchio, and afterwards the place passed to the De Cuneo, to the Lagonessa, and on the twentieth of December 1446 was bought by Troilo Origlia, before a long succession of families. Of the seven churches that once stood here, four remain; the castle of the Cocozza Campanile, the last of those families, is half abandoned and decaying. Between 1940 and 1943 Pannarano was one of the Campanian comuni designated by the fascist authorities to receive Jewish refugees in civil internment: they were freed with the arrival of the Allied army, in September 1943. Above the village stretches the WWF oasis of Montagna di Sopra, which includes a place called Acqua delle vene; the land gives Aglianico and chestnuts of a variety called santo manco.