Caianello

The station was opened in 1861 at a crossroads that belonged to Caianello — the Quadrivio, also called the tavern of the Chain, where the via Casilina crossed the road that led on one side towards Venafro and on the other towards Teano. But the laying of the railway shifted the boundary between Caianello and the neighbouring comune, and the station building with almost all its appurtenances ended up registered on the other side. The village that grew around it was therefore called Vairano Scalo, and later the railways also reversed the order of the two names on the sign: today the station is Vairano-Caianello. For another thirty years the people who lived there went on calling it Caianello Stazione all the same.

Caianello is the «cheerful little village» where maestro Scannagatti lives in Totò a colori — and the real Caianello has nothing to do with it: the scenes that portray it were shot at Capena, and the panoramic cutaway view is a picture of Vico Equense. In the film the name is misspelled throughout as well, Caianiello, on the local paper and on the welcome banner: the film was made in two months, at the beginning of 1952, and Totò and his screenwriter were Neapolitans. The name of the comune, on the other hand, is a diminutive: from Caiano, a small village named in the tithe accounts of the thirteen hundreds, came Caianello, little Caiano. It was long the possession of a single family, then it was joined to Teano, and in 1859 it became a comune of its own. In the war it was bombed again and again precisely because of that station; the Americans came in on 28 October 1943.