Parete

The first strawberry museum in Italy stands inside a ducal palace. The countryside here has been for centuries so fertile as to hold together on the same patch of ground the trees and the sown fields — the vine married to poplars, and the wheat — and from the nineteen sixties strawberry growing took hold. Today the town, fully inside the conurbation between Naples and Caserta, struggles to defend its territory from the erosion of residential subdivisions; and to put agriculture back at the centre, in April 2017 the Museo della Fragola was opened, the first of its kind in Italy, inside the restored Palazzo Ducale. The palace, a national monument since 1939, was first a military tower and then a lordly residence: originally it had five towers, pulled down already during the seventeenth century.

The village stood at a crossroads: on one side the ancient via Campana, which led from Pozzuoli to Capua, on the other the via Antica which led to the colony of Liternum, on lake Patria, the refuge of Scipio Africanus. Much more of that past could have been kept: some tombs built by the Oscans in pre-Roman times were sacked and destroyed by unknown hands at the beginning of the nineteen seventies. What remains is the mother church of San Pietro Apostolo, built where a place of worship of the dawn of Christianity already stood, with its Romanesque layout, its sixteenth-century capitals and cornices and most of the paintings from the eighteenth century: a national monument since 1939 as well. And the feast remains: the image of Maria Santissima della Rotonda, found according to local tradition by a peasant on the Monday after Easter and documented in worship at least from 1500, was solemnly crowned by the Vatican Chapter in 1920. On Easter Monday the procession goes all round the village; on the following Sunday there is the Flight of the Angel, with a little tower set up in the square in front of the parish church and a cable stretched to the church, along which two little girls dressed as angels cross the square.