San Lorenzo Maggiore

Before this town, down by the river, there was Limata. In 663 the place was the scene of a battle in which the Lombard Mittola, count of Capua, defeated the army of the Byzantine emperor Constans II; around the year one thousand it was a flourishing centre of trade, and with the Normans it became the favourite residence of the Sanframondo counts. On the twenty-sixth of December 1382 the castle of Limata hosted Louis of Anjou, come down to take the kingdom and to avenge the killing of queen Joanna: the Sanframondo had to feed thousands of knights and their horses. Then the fief passed to the Carafa, who preferred to live in Naples and left the castle empty; that absence, together with the miasmas rising from the Calore, emptied the town, and in 1570 its last parish priest was appointed. Those who left climbed into the hills: within sixty years the families here went from eighty-one to two hundred and six.

The new town was administered by an Universitas, as all the south was: a board of four citizens appointed every May by the property owners, plus six deputies also elected each year. But there was a condition that says everything about where power really lay: the meetings had to be authorised by the governor who protected the feudatories' interests and who resided in the capital of the county, at Cerreto Sannita. A town council that had to ask permission in order to meet. The earthquake of the fifth of June 1688 did great damage and the town was rebuilt at once. Of the remotest past there survives an object that is no longer here: the so-called almond of Chelles, a flake of quartzite worked by prehistoric man to skin animals, found in 1915 at the locality of Limata itself and today kept in a museum in Paris.