San Giorgio del Sannio

This village lost the mountain from its name because of a policeman. Until 1929 it was called San Giorgio la Montagna, and before that San Giorgio della Montagna di Montefusco, from the fief to which its hamlets belonged; it is told that Arturo Bocchini, chief of police and a very influential man at the time, tired of being called «the mountain man», saw to it that the comune's denomination became San Giorgio del Sannio. In the village there is more than one Palazzo Bocchini, in more than one square. Until 1811 these lands were hamlets of Montefusco, inside the province of Principato Ultra, of which Montefusco had been the capital until 1806; before the Spinelli princes, who arrived in 1677, the place had been a fief of the Iamvilla, to whom Joanna II had given it, and then of the Malanotte.

The shape of the village, however, is the work of one man alone: Carlo III Spinelli, who between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century had built in today's piazza Risorgimento his own palace, a fountain, a storehouse and the new church, and who in 1720 founded there a monastery of nuns which, added to the old baronial palace, became the boarding school of the Salesian sisters. His marble bust still stands in a corner of that square, whose fountain with four dolphins was rebuilt in 2004. At Sant'Agnese the church goes back by tradition to the feudal lord Simone Goffredi, documented in 1318, and the parish was consecrated on 23 September 1694 by cardinal Vincenzo Maria Orsini, the future pope Benedict XIII. There is finally a monument of quite another kind: in 2009 the local cycling club placed on viale Spinelli a sculpture at the exact point where, in 1987, the finish line of a stage of the Giro d'Italia had been set.