Gricignano di Aversa

This town still measures itself starting from Capua. In its coat of arms there is a milestone with the number seven carved in Roman figures: the seven miles that separated it from ancient Capua. According to scholars the settlement was born at the time of the centuriation of the Ager Campanus, and the grid can still be read in the streets — the main cardo is the old via Larga with via Sant'Antonio Abate and corso Umberto I, the main decumanus is via Casolla with via Aversa. The name is Roman too: it comes from the senator Lucius Julius Graecinus, who lived in the time of Tiberius and was the father of the far better known Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the governor of Britain. With the arrival of the first settlers the place was called Villae Greicinianum and then Casalis de Graecignani; already before the year one thousand the documents write it in four or five different ways, Graeciniani, Chicianniani, Graecinius, Graecinianum.

For seventeen years the comune did not exist: on 12 April 1929 it was suppressed and aggregated to Aversa, and it regained its autonomy only in 1946. The dialect, until a few decades ago, was closer to that of the villages of the Atellan area than to that of nearby Aversa, and it changed the vowels, a into e and o into u: cheese became chese, the plate pietto, the spoon cucchiero, the walnuts nuce, the ditch fuosso; and two words of Oscan origin have remained intact, isci and fee, which serve to stop horses and pack animals. Today, in the comunal territory, there is the US Navy Support Site, a residential citadel complete with swimming pools, sports facilities and a hospital, where the American servicemen who work at the United States bases in Campania are housed.