Dragoni

The coat of arms of Dragoni, recognised in 1936, carries on a silver field a black seated dragon, and the decree explains why: that figure «mirrors the topographical conformation of the territory». It is not, then, a heraldic beast chosen to impress, but a drawing of the ground: someone, looking at the map of the comune at the foot of Monte Melito, saw in it the outline of a crouching dragon, and that outline became the emblem. The name too works the opposite way from what one expects: in the Middle Ages the town was one of the fiefs of the noble family of the Dragoni, and it is the family that took its name from the place, not the place from the family. Usually it happens the other way round, and in the entries of Italian comuni one almost always reads the other direction.

The flag the comune actually flies, however, is not the one the decrees describe: in place of the official arms it carries a different variant, with a green winged dragon on a blue field. It is a small discrepancy between the paper and the practice, of the kind nobody corrects because nobody notices. Another discrepancy, a larger one, concerns administrative geography: from 1927 to 1945 Dragoni was not in the province of Caserta but in that of Benevento, because in those years the province of Caserta had been abolished and its territory shared out among the neighbouring ones. For eighteen years the inhabitants had a different provincial capital without having moved a metre. The town, which today counts fewer than two thousand people, has six churches, and is served by two stations of the Alifana railway.