On the twenty-second of July 1139, inside the castle of this village, a king knelt before the pope he had just taken prisoner. Roger the Norman, excommunicated by Innocent the Second, had taken refuge in the stronghold of Galluccio and was being besieged by the papal troops; but the pope fell prisoner in an ambush laid for him by Roger's son and was brought before him in the castle. Roger then threw himself at his feet asking pardon, and the pontiff granted it to him together with peace. Shortly afterwards, in the castle of Mignano, a treaty recognised him officially as king of Sicily and duke of Apulia and Calabria: the kingdom was legitimised here. The stronghold too had been born of a war. In the tenth century the Saracens, coming up the Garigliano valley, built at the foot of Monte Camino a strongpoint to defend themselves from the troops of the League led by pope John the Tenth, and to this day there is a hamlet on that spot called Saraceni; after their defeat, in 915, the princes of Capua raised a fortress there with the pope's approval. Their descendants took the name Galluccio and put a red cock on a silver field in their arms.
The family held the fief until 1480 — in 1283 one of them, Pietro Galluccio, was appointed viceroy of Terra di Lavoro beyond the Volturno — and then the place passed to Rossetto Fieramosca, who left it to Ettore. In the fifteenth century the fief took the shape it still has: thirty-five villages scattered between the Garigliano, Roccamonfina and Monte Camino, whose churches are listed one by one in a bull of pope Julius the Second still kept in the archive of the collegiate church of Santo Stefano. An old tradition holds that it was Julius the Second himself who wanted that collegiate church as it stands today, in gratitude for the welcome given him by the local parish priest when he stopped at Galluccio. And in one of those villages, the borgo of Cavelle, was born in 1429 Giannantonio Campano, humanist, bishop of Crotone and of Teramo, papal governor of Todi, Foligno, Assisi and Città di Castello: we know where he was born because he says so himself, in one of his poems.
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📅 Every year, on 17 January
On 17 January Galluccio celebrates its patron Saint Anthony the Abbot: it was the municipal administration, in the 1970s, that set this date for the patronal holiday.
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 Galluccio, but an easy day trip away.
