Falciano del Massico

Falciano del Massico has 3,673 inhabitants at the foot of Monte Massico, with Lake Falciano in the plain below. These lands are the ancient ager Falernus, where the Falernian was made, the wine that Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Cicero and Martial praised and that was exported all over the Mediterranean. The name is disputed: some tie it to the Faustian wine, some to the Latin falcibus, the sickles «for reaping the corn and pruning the vines», some to an estate name.

In dialect the village is still called Fauciano, the form already attested in the ninth century; Falciano only took hold in the seventeenth. The tax register of 1753 says how people lived: of the hundred and twenty hearths counted, in half the cases the head of the family was recorded as a day labourer. Falciano was a hamlet of Carinola until 1964, when it obtained autonomy after a long and contested process; it still remains on Carinola's coat of arms, as one of the four lozenges around the edge.