Formicola

On the arms of Formicola there is an ant climbing an ear of wheat, and at the sides two letters, B and D, standing for Bene Docet: the ant teaches well. The entry proposes a different origin for the name, from a Hebrew fhor-michol, «boiling stream», on account of the hot springs of the area, a thesis said to be supported by the springs found towards Trebula; but the arms read the name the way everybody reads it. The fief changed hands a good many times: to the Frangipane under the Angevins, in 1306 to Tommaso de Marzano duke of Sessa, in 1420 to Cubello d'Antignano of Capua, in 1445 to the lords della Ratta, and on the first of February 1465 to Diomede I Carafa, whose house held it until 1806 with the title of princes of Colubrano. It was Diomede who had the palace built in the middle of the village, with a little tower crowned by a dovecote and a seggio: and on the windows of that seggio, the entry says, the heads of the executed were displayed. The baronial palace was finished in 1467.

In 1806, the very year in which Joseph Bonaparte abolished feudalism, the last of the house, Francesco II Carafa, founded an Arcadian academy: he called it «il Caprario», after the mountain at whose foot the poets liked to gather. Then the comuni were born: Formicola went at first into the district of Caiazzo, but from 1808, with Joachim Murat's reform, Formicola, Pontelatone, Sasso, Liberi, Cisterna and Prea were gathered into a district of Formicola that lasted until 1927, when the fascist regime suppressed it together with the province of Terra di Lavoro; in 1945 the comune entered the newborn province of Caserta. Of its churches, Santa Cristina, built around the year 1000 and rebuilt in the eighteenth century, keeps a relic of the martyr of Bolsena; and the church of the Spirito Santo was raised in 1571 at the expense of Roberta Carafa, vicereine of Sicily, and enlarged in 1760 by the Verginian abbot Pascasio Anecio, who put in it an enormous canvas of 1765 by Gerolamo Starace and Antonio Vecchione, with San Guglielmo receiving the rule from San Benedetto.