Tocco Caudio

Tocco was the capital of its valley, and it lost everything it had. Until the fifteenth century the Valle Vitulanese was called the valley of Tocco. In 930 a monastic cell «in Toccu» depended on the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno; in 950 there was a castrum Tocci, inhabited and of some administrative weight, since a judge, Milone, lived there; in 971 the place appears as the seat of a gastaldate, and the bull of pope Stephen IX of 1058 listed Tocco among the bishoprics suffragan to the archdiocese of Benevento. Then it all went away: by 1109 the trace of the bishopric is lost, and the chief church, San Pietro, was no more than an archpriest's church — a dignity of which even so it was stripped by Roberto di Alife, lord of the place, to give it to Sant'Andrea at Cacciano, more central in the valley. The name has been Tocco Caudio only since 1864.

The old village stood on an isolated spur of tuff with very steep sides, carved by the waters that run at its foot: it is Campanian grey tuff, the ignimbrite left by a super-eruption of the Campi Flegrei caldera thirty-nine thousand years ago, and at Cava Arena the columnar fissuring with its five or six-sided base can be seen perfectly. Two torrents, the Cauto and the Reviola, gnaw the spur from west and east and join below to make the Jenga. Between the sliding ground and the earthquakes — the most destructive, the entry says, were those of September 1293, December 1456, June 1688, July 1930 and August 1962 — the village could not hold: after the quake of 1980 the historic centre was abandoned altogether and the people moved to contrada Friuni, on the eastern edge of the valley. Tocco vecchio is a ghost town now.