Pesco Sannita

The name comes from pesclum, which in medieval Latin is the boulder, the crag: the castle stood on a spine of rock and took its name from it. In the documents the form keeps changing — Pesco, Piesco, Lo Pesco — until, under the Norman lordship of the della Marra family, the village is called Pesco della Marra. Then an inexpert scribe copies it wrongly, and from that spelling mistake Pescolamazza is born. The village was called that, with the surname of its lords mangled, for most of its history; only in the twentieth century did it take back the old name and become Pesco Sannita. The name it bore longest was somebody's slip of the pen.

The castle, on the other hand, nobody took. Around 1120 Rainolfo, count of Avellino and Airola, entered the county of Ariano to lay waste its castles, but having reached the boundaries of Pesclum, held by Gerardo della Marra, he turned back without fighting. The source finds this odd and tries to explain it: Rainolfo had gathered some four hundred knights and many foot soldiers, and not for a demonstration; probably it was the solidity of the fortifications that dissuaded him from a siege. And in withdrawing he burned neither fields nor woods, which was the usual practice — a sign that ruining the Pesco countryside would not have damaged Norman interests alone. Hence the suspicion that this castle was an advanced Norman fortress in Beneventan territory. In 1132 the new constable of Benevento tried again: he destroyed Farnitum, today Fragneto l'Abate, then assaulted Pesclum, and once more the resistance of Roberto della Marra and the impregnability of the place sent the attackers back to Benevento. Then for four centuries the fief was bought, sold and pawned almost always together with Pietrelcina, with the prices noted down one by one: the duke of San Teodoro, for instance, paid twenty thousand two hundred ducats to be invested with it and a few months later sold the three fiefs for seventy-five thousand.