Ailano

Ailano stands on a hill ringed by woods, and at the foot of the hill several springs come out: one of them is warm and acid-sulphurous, and to that spring is owed the belief, never confirmed by any excavation, that in Roman times there was here a village called Vulcano. A Roman village in these parts did exist, though: the Tabula Peutingeriana marks Ebutiana nine Roman miles north of Alife, and the reckoning fits today's Ailano well enough. The fortified village begins with the Normans, who in the documents write it first Athilanum and then Aylanum, within the orbit of the county of Alife; the old centre still has the narrow winding lanes that start from the castle, and of the castle there remains a massive round tower with a scarped base. The parish church of San Giovanni apostle and evangelist is of the twelfth century, altered more than once: at the last restoration the old ceiling, a sky embroidered with stars, gave way to a modern coffered vault.

The oldest thing, however, lies out in the fields, and it is a ruin. The monastery of Santa Maria in Cingla was founded in 748, or perhaps in 750, by the duke of Benevento Gisulf II and his wife Scauniberga, and it served to receive the daughters of the adelingi, the Lombard nobles: a boarding house for girls of good family, in the middle of the eighth century. The Saracens razed it in 847, and did it again a century later, in 943: that time the nuns moved to Capua and the complex passed to the abbey of Montecassino, which through abbot Gerard rebuilt the church. Much later, in the second war, the Germans entrenched themselves behind the Cerrito and Calegna hills and held the Americans up for days; the villagers, fearing the worst, went off into the mountains, and the Americans entered Ailano on the twenty-eighth of October 1943. In 1927 the comune had been annexed to the province of Benevento; it went back to that of Caserta in 1945.