Sant'Agata de' Goti

The Goths have nothing to do with it: the name comes from a French surname badly pronounced. The first half was given by the Lombards in the eighth century, dedicating the city to the martyr of Catania; the second came with the Normans, because after 1117 the fief belonged to the Drengot, and Rainulfo Drengot, count of Sant'Agata, was among the «Potentes» who had the right to give their own name to the fortress. In time, in France as in Italy, that surname began to be pronounced differently, until it became De-Goth in the age of the Angevins. When the family died out the name stayed; and centuries later whoever read or heard «Feudo di Sant'Agata De' Goti» no longer thought of a French house but of the Goths, the Germanic people. The sources are blunt: the Norman traces in the town can be seen, a Gothic foundation cannot be demonstrated in any way.

Here stood the Samnite city of Saticula, which Virgil names in the Aeneid. In 343 before Christ the consul Aulus Cornelius Cossus set on the tufa rock a castrum, that is a winter camp for veterans; in 315, during the second Samnite war, Saticula was besieged and held out for two years. The Romans did not build walls where the geology already offered a defence: here it was enough to trace the cardo and the decumano and to open the gates at their ends, and the rivers did the rest. Later, with the reform of the army and the arrival of the Eastern Romans, the castrum became a kastron, and the tufa spurs were made still less approachable by building on top of them a ring of houses set one against another, with very few and very small openings, keeping the three gates. The old centre on the rock is still that, beside the new town built from the end of the nineteenth century.