Pontelandolfo

The name is that of a bridge: Pons Landulphi, after the Lombard prince Landolfo who around 980 probably had a crossing built over the Lenta stream to reach his castle. In the time of the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines the town grew because a considerable number of exiles from Siena took refuge here. It underwent two sieges, that of Roger the Norman in 1138 and the one ordered by Ferdinand the First of Aragon in 1462, and the earthquakes of the Sannio struck it more than once, particularly in 1456 and in 1688. Of that castle only the tower is left, more than twenty metres high and fourteen across, with base walls four and a half metres thick: it was built no earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century, when the feudal lords grasped the strategic value of the place after the armies of Charles of Anjou and Louis of Hungary had passed through. The earthquake of 1688 brought down the castle and left the tower standing; it is privately owned today.

On the fourteenth of August 1861 Pontelandolfo was, together with nearby Casalduni, the scene of a military action by the newly formed Royal Italian Army: a reprisal for the killing, by local brigands, of forty-five soldiers at Casalduni on the seventh of August that year. The town was set on fire by the Italian troops, and no official figures were ever given for the total number of victims of the repression. There is now a monument in the village to the victims of the massacre. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a great many people of Pontelandolfo crossed the Atlantic, and one of their destinations was Waterbury, in Connecticut, with which the comune is twinned: there the emigrants and their descendants founded the Pontelandolfo Community Club and gather surrounded by structures built on purpose to resemble the characteristic features of the village they came from, beginning with the ancient tower that overlooks the square.