Puglianello

Puglianello lies on the plain, not far from the Volturno, and its name probably comes from monte Pugliano, the hill behind Telese: somebody from up there is supposed to have come down here and founded a little Pugliano. The village appears for the first time in the ninth century as Pullianellu, belonged to the Pugliano lords of Alife and in the fifteenth century became an autonomous fief, passing from hand to hand among the Celano, the Paolella, the Martino des Carles of Teano and the Guercia of Naples. Then it began to empty. At the end of the sixteenth century the inhabitants were about a hundred, and they went on falling: in a notarial act of 1702 some citizens of Faicchio declare that «already before the contagion of 1656 the said Castle of Puglianello was uninhabited by its citizens, without inhabitants, without houses and without dwellings», and that all that stood was the baron's house, partly in ruins, the churches of Santa Maria and San Giacomo and the tavern, which was the baron's too. In 1667 the administrators of the chapel of the Most Holy Body of Christ had asked the bishop of Cerreto Sannita to be allowed to sell two bells: the chapel was falling down and the people had gone elsewhere.

Those who set it back on its feet were the feudal lords themselves, who in the following years called in settlers from outside: the village began again from scratch, with new people. Its administrative history then made a perfect full circle: in 1848 Puglianello was annexed as a hamlet to San Salvatore Telesino, and it became an autonomous comune again exactly a century later, in 1948. In the middle of the village stands the barons' castle, an almost square plan, four cylindrical corner towers with the scarp running up to the cornice, yellow tuff — the stone this area is rich in — and an old portico in the inner courtyard: today it is divided into several flats, and people live inside it. The church of San Giacomo, first named in the fourteenth century under the title of Santa Maria Assunta, was rebuilt after the earthquake of the fifth of June 1688 and then wholly remade in modern forms in 1966.