Sant'Arcangelo Trimonte

Until the nineteenth century this village was called Montemalo, and that name came from Oscan: the same root as Maloenton, which the Romans latinised into Maleventum and which is now Benevento. The new name tells two things instead: the archangels of a church that no longer exists, in the Sant'Arcangelo district, and the three hills over which the old centre spreads. Of the castle, which the Lombards raised where caves had been inhabited by Samnite shepherds, few remains are left; medieval chronicles recalled it above all for the great extent of its dungeons.

The most singular part of its history is how the village filled up again. After the earthquake of 1456 much of the inland Kingdom of Naples had been left empty, and towards the sixteenth century the Schiavoni settled there — the peoples fleeing the Balkans before the Turkish advance: Serbo-Croats, Albanians, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, all called by that single name. It was they who rebuilt Montemalo, raised the new church outside the walls and the one dedicated to the Holy Archangels which later gave the comune its name. Of those people no trace is left, save a few Slavic words that still surface in the dialect. The comune, which was in the province of Avellino, passed to that of Benevento only in 1978.