Marcianise

Historians do not agree on the name, and the argument is worth the visit: some derive it from the Lombard Marzani plus a suffix that pointed to a particular tax, some from an «Ad Martia nisi» tied to a cult of Mars practised by veteran colonists, and some — the linguists — simply from the estate of a certain Marcianus. It is the third town we meet named after its Roman landowner. Marcianise lies in the flattest plain in Campania, the Liburia that later became Terra di Lavoro, closed to the south by the Regi Lagni, the straight canals of the great drainage, which in the early two-thousands paid the price of toxic dumping.

Hemp was grown here, and the river Clanio was diverted on purpose to fill the retting tanks. Today the town lives on logistics and industry, and in its Coca-Cola plant, in 1955, a local worker invented Fanta. Since 1977 the Excelsior Boxe has made it a capital of boxing without rhetoric: the gym here is a civic institution as the theatre is elsewhere. The centre keeps the church of San Michele with the wooden crucifix of 1706 that the townspeople call miraculous, and the Fountain of the Dolphins by a pupil of Vanvitelli, with the medallions of Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina that nobody ever took down. On 25 March, for the Annunciation, they keep 'o perduono: engaged couples abstain and exchange sweets, because legend said that children conceived that day were born werewolves. Caserta and its royal palace are ten minutes away.