The name seems to say «house of light», but according to the scholars it should rather mean «castle of the wood». The oldest document naming it is of 964: the Cronaca Volturnense tells that the Capuan princes Pandolfo I and Landolfo III gave to the Benedictine monks of the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno their possessions, which included the lands of the Homines de Casaluci, of the Homines de Apranu and a village called locus qui dicitur Piro — a donation made, in the formula of the time, pro salvatione animae. Older still is a document referring to the year 900, which speaks of a piece of land at Pipone given to the monastery of Montecassino. The present comune was born from the cooperation of those rural villages — Casaluce with its castle, Aprano, Piro and Popone — and it is still cut in half by a Roman centuriation, today's corso Vittorio Emanuele.
Popone may be the oldest centre of the diocese of Aversa: it is traced back to a pre-Roman colonisation come from Cumae in the third century before Christ, when peoples of Greek origin pushed inland and built their village on the highest ground of a plain surrounded by marshes, swamps and woods. The Cumans raised the so-called castle of Popone, which gathered the village until 1813, when a pestilence emptied it completely; what remains of it — a small church and a seventeenth-century fort rebuilt on the Cuman ruins — stands a few metres north-west of the Norman castle. For in 1030 five Norman knights of the Drengot family arrived in the Liburia with three hundred men of escort, and put themselves at the service first of Pandolfo IV of Capua and then of Sergio IV of Naples; among the payments they received was a house of tufa stone, which they turned into a fortress. Their leader, Rainulfo Drengot, chose this spot because it lay halfway between Naples and Capua — and a few kilometres away he was laying meanwhile the foundations of Aversa, which would become the first Norman county of the South. Much later, in 1929, Casaluce was merged with Teverola into a comune called Fertilia: the two were separated again in 1946.
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📅 Every year, from 15 to 19 October
From 15 to 19 October Casaluce celebrates its patron Our Lady of Casaluce, whose devotion reached as far as São Paulo, Brazil, where the Italian community of the Mooca neighbourhood still celebrates her today.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Casaluce, but an easy day trip away.
