Capriati a Volturno

On the coat of arms of Capriati a Volturno, at least since the eighteenth century, there is a roe deer — or a stag, depending on who is looking — but in all likelihood the name never had anything to do with animals. The soundest hypothesis is that Capriata was the estate of a Roman landowner named Caprius, with the suffix -ata added: in time the memory of that gentleman was lost, the word remained, and the word resembled the beast's name too closely for somebody not to draw it on the shield. The same thing happened to nearby Gallo Matese: its name comes from the Lombard wald, that is wood, and its arms carry cocks. The oldest document naming the place is a commemoratorium written between 881 and 901 by brother Sabatino, priest and monk, in the Chronicon of the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno: Capriata, he writes, was not a village but an area divided in half between the bishopric of Isernia and the monastery, and he had been sent there by his own abbot — «alas!», he notes — and every year he dispatched from there a hundred measures of wheat and forty pigs to the convent.

It took time for that area to become a place. Only in 1059 do the documents stop calling it curtem and describe it as castellum quod dicitur Capriata; and in 1065 Montecassino handed it over, adding three hundred bezants, to the duke of Gaeta in exchange for another castle. From 1413 came the Pandone, who held it for more than a century: they raised the tower, built a comital palace in Catalan style and turned the upper part of the village into a fortified residence with stores, garden, barracks and an enormous stable still called Stallone — the Pandone had some of the best horses of the age, the ones painted in the rooms of the castle of Venafro. Beneath all this remains the Roman centuriation of the plain towards the Volturno: that division of the fields can still be recognised today in the boundaries of the farms.