Paolisi

The name appears for the first time in the will of a certain Rateprando who on the thirty-first of January of the year 800 gave his possessions «in finibus Paulisi» to the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. What that word means is disputed. It might come from pau, an early medieval contraction of pagus, that is a village, as at Paupisi. Or from palus, marsh, by way of the late Latin padulis, as at Padula and Paduli, because the Caudine valley in Samnite times was still an undrained basin. The second reading has an argument of its own: in the marsh of Fucecchio, in Tuscany, two place names occur together, iscla, the raised ground in the middle of the waters, and faventia, the zone from which clay is dug for pots and bricks. Both are here as well: the river is called Isclero, and until the last century it was known as the Faenza.

High up, on the plain of San Berardo, a mountain meadow ringed with beeches, stand the ruins of a late medieval building thought to have been a hermitage, and lower down the spring of San Berardo gathers the water into a stone drinking trough. The upright stone that serves as the fountain carries three lines. The first is a date, 1767, the year the fountain was first set up. The second reads R.A.D. 1887, the year of a restoration. The third is an acronym, M.P.A.F., which some read as manu propria aquae fontem and link to a fourth inscription, badly worn, that seems to say Sanctus Berardus fecit: but nobody is sure. Down in the village the noble houses all line up along a single axis, in quarters that people still call Fòr'e Ttùrre, Capo 'e Vascio and Capo 'e 'Copp', with dated portals, paved courtyards and stone wells. And the Lombard abbey of San Fortunato, which the documents place in oppido Paulisorum, today stands in the territory of Arpaia.