San Salvatore Telesino

In the municipal territory lie the remains of Telesia, a Samnite city already named by the sources in the Punic wars and made a colony in Roman times: the recognised blocks are forty-four, each about ninety-eight metres by forty-one, and the towers of the walls stood on average seventy-five metres apart, dropping to some thirty in the flat part of the town. The Saracen raids of 847 and then the earthquake of 1349 forced its abandonment. San Salvatore was born precisely from that: a group of refugees from Telesia was taken in by the monks of the Benedictine monastery of the Holy Saviour, who gave them a strip of land on which to build the new settlement. The village was therefore called Casale di San Salvatore, to say whom it depended on, and under the abbey it remained for centuries.

The abbey was built around the tenth century; the first abbot on record is one Leopoldo, mentioned in 1075. In 1098 abbot Giovanni received here saint Anselm of Aosta, who according to some historians finished writing the Cur Deus homo in this very place; in the abbey there is still the well of Saint Anselm, dug according to tradition on the spot the saint had pointed out. The height of its splendour came with abbot Alessandro Telesino, between 1127 and 1143, a man of great learning and political skill; in 1343, instead, abbot Vito had to put down the rebellion of the people of Castel Campagnano, who refused to pay their dues. In the church a fresco of 1300 with saint Scholastica is preserved. On the hill above the village stand the ruins of the Rocca, built in the thirteenth century by the Sanframondo counts: when the bishops left Telesia it housed the curia for some decades, so much so that in the fifteenth century they called it Rocca De Episcopio. The village was very small: thirty-two families in 1532, twenty-six after the plague of 1656, and heavy damage from the earthquake of 5 June 1688. At the foot of Monte Pugliano rise, finally, the springs of the Grassano, which Leandro Alberti cited in the sixteenth century for the coldness of their water.