Capodrise

In 1789 a hot-air balloon came down here. On 13 September, in the presence of king Ferdinand IV and of his wife Maria Carolina, Vincenzo Lunardi rose from Naples meaning to reach the papal territory; he stayed in the air an hour and climbed to about six thousand feet, but a failure forced him down, and his flight ended precisely at Capodrise. The village, of course, is far older than that day: it is named for the first time in 1113, in a parchment with which the archbishop of Capua, setting up the diocese of Caserta, assigned to it also the parishes of Sant'Andrea and San Donato, in the locality of Capitrisio. From 1307 the documents stop calling it a «loco», that is a mere cluster of houses, and begin to call it a «villa»; around 1400 it became an «università», that is a territory that administered itself and no longer depended on officials appointed by the rulers.

Then come the crooked centuries. In 1499 Federico d'Aragona, short of money, had to sell the county of Acerra with its dependencies, among them the hamlet of Capodrise; the plagues of 1527 and 1556 arrived and the earthquake of 1538, and in the month of July 1556 alone fifty people died here, among them the parish priest don Giacomo De Filippo, buried in the little church of Sant'Antonio Abate, where he still is. In 1738 the Spanish drove out the Austrians, and their soldiers found lodging in the houses of the village to the great annoyance of the owners, who were compensated afterwards with a small payment. And when the royal palace of Caserta began to rise, Capodrise found itself on the court's road: the royals passed through here, and the inhabitants had to pay for the upkeep of the stretches of road towards Caserta. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the village began to pay for an attorney of its own, in Naples and in Capua, for the disputes between the università, the court and the citizens. On 14 April 1928 fascism suppressed the comune and annexed it to Marcianise: the offices were dismantled and many documents were lost. Today Capodrise is a comune again, but of that passage a hole remains in the archives.