Castel Morrone

An old saying has it that the castle of Morrone can be seen from every corner, and indeed Monte Castello is only 420 metres high but commands a view of three hundred and sixty degrees: the Matese massif, the valleys running towards the Sannio, the Volturno flowing at its foot towards Capua and, on clear days, the gulf of Naples. On the hill remain five kilometres of megalithic walls of the seventh or sixth century before Christ, within which the ancient city of Plistica is said to have lived, and in 216 before Christ that same fortification housed the camp of Hannibal, come from Cannae. The town still keeps the structure of the pagus of the Tifata with its nine fundus of Samnite memory, and it was called Morrone in Terra di Lavoro until the unification of Italy. On the summit stood the altars of a goddess who over the millennia changed her name but not her task — to protect the harvests, and the grain in particular: Patana-Pistia, Kerres, Ceres — down to today's protectress, who is simply called Madonna del Castello and to whom, around the eleventh century, a small temple was dedicated. In 1113 that little church is already cited in a bull of the bishop of Capua as Santa Maria de Murrone.

Morrone is one of the oldest universitas civium of the kingdom, documented from 1280. The ducal palace was enlarged in the second half of the seventeenth century by Onofrio di Mauro to celebrate the title of duke of Morrone, obtained in 1662, and today belongs to the comune; the bell tower of the church of the Annunziata, more than 34 metres high, was built in 1692 by one Cesare Piroisa. In the mid-seventeen-hundreds two equally rich and quite opposite gentlemen lived in the town: Francescantonio Bonito, who though possessing a quarter of the duke's wealth competed in luxury and kept ladies-in-waiting for his wife, valets, coachmen and even a private chaplain; and Carlo Alzone, who lived in a reserved manner and at his death, in 1752, left his whole fortune to the fathers of the Mission of Saint Vincent de Paul — which is why his palace escaped decay and still houses a nursery and a home for the elderly. The hill became decisive again in 1860: during the battle of the Volturno the first battalion of Bersaglieri under captain Pilade Bronzetti took position there, and Garibaldi called the place the Thermopylae of Italy.