Maddaloni

There are at least four versions of the name, and the finest concerns a Gaul. According to a local scholar, the Boii who had followed Hannibal into Italy grew tired of him and, being used to living at the foot of the Alps, found at the foot of Monte Tifata a place that resembled home: they stopped here instead of going down to Capua, and from the name of their prince, Matalo, the local people were called Mataluni. The other hypotheses bring in the monastery of the Magdalene, the Arabic magdalo meaning «castle», and the half-moon the town draws against its hill. Beneath all this there is in any case a real city: Calatia, Etruscan and then Samnite on the via Appia, which in the Second Punic War really did side with Hannibal.

The old borgo is gone: in 1460 Ferrante of Aragon put it to the flames to punish a rebel feudatory, and Maddaloni rebuilt itself lower down, along the foot of the hills, around the palace the Carafa — dukes here for three and a half centuries — raised at the base of the slope. The castle and the Norman tower remain above. The Giordano Bruno boarding college, the oldest school in the province, is not Bourbon but Napoleonic: Joseph Bonaparte established it by a law of 1807, and Luigi Settembrini was among its pupils; in the historic hall the ceiling is covered by a canvas of 720 square metres, the largest painting on canvas in the world. Just outside, Vanvitelli's Carolino aqueduct — UNESCO listed together with the royal palace of Caserta — strides across the valley on the Ponti della Valle.