San Bartolomeo in Galdo

This town came into being by resolution. In 1255, after papal troops had defeated the Saracens of Lucera, the territory was given to the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria di Gualdo Mazzocca; and in 1326 the abbot Nicola da Ferrazzano resolved to found a town here, asking the assent of the king of Naples, Robert of Anjou. Building began the following year. The name comes from the apostle Bartholomew, whose cult had been spread by the Lombard prince Sicardo, who in 838 had brought the saint's relics to Benevento after taking them from the Saracens of Lipari; Galdo, on the other hand, is simply the medieval Latin for a wood. In the mother church there are still two fifteenth-century portals that come from the very abbey which had founded the town.

San Bartolomeo is one of only four Campanian municipalities whose territory touches two other regions, here Puglia and Molise, and it looks down on the Fortore, the river Pliny the Elder calls Fertor, flumen portuosum, which rises a few kilometres upstream from the meeting of four brooks. In the Montauro wood there are boar, foxes, dormice and five Apennine wolves. Its people, on the other hand, have been counted and lost more than once: after 1497 the town grew by taking in the survivors of three villages destroyed in the wars against Charles VIII, but between 1595 and the plague of 1656 the households fell from five hundred and sixty-seven to two hundred and seventy-four, and after the Second World War emigration carried off about half the inhabitants.