Cancello ed Arnone

The name says two villages, and indeed the municipality was born from the union of hamlets that gravitated towards Capua. Arnone appears for the first time in a document of 1114 from the monastery of Sant'Angelo in Formis; then come the Filangieri, the Estendarda, the Cantelmo, and for a long period the land belongs to the archbishops of Capua, until at the beginning of the fourteenth century the fief passes to Bartolomeo di Capua and in the eighteenth to the Sanseverino. The coat of arms, recognised in 1945, does not complicate matters: on a silver field there is a golden gate with black bars. And at Arnone archaeologists have found a wine-making plant of the first century after Christ: wine has been made here for two thousand years.

The decisive story, however, is another one, and it has no memorable dates because it lasted too long. In the seventeenth century the Spanish viceroys began the draining of the municipal land, low marshy ground close to the Volturno. The works were taken up again in the nineteenth century and were completed only after the Second World War: three and a half centuries to dry the same marsh. Everything you see here today, where people live and what they grow, depends on that very long labour and on those who carried it on in silence, generation after generation.