Piedimonte Matese

That the water of the Matese lake and the spring in the town were the same thing was proved by an experiment. In 1953 a dye was thrown into the swallow hole of the lake, the one they call the «Scennerato»: five days later it coloured the spring water of the Torano, which comes out near the old centre, at the foot of the San Giovanni quarter. The Torano was Piedimonte's main watercourse and ran through the inhabited centre before heading for the Volturno; in 1963 it was channelled into the Campania aqueduct, and it disappeared from the town. The same fate befell the Maretto, also called Toranello, channelled in 1965.

What a prince owned here in the eighteenth century is photographed by the Bourbon cadastre. In 1754 the feudal lord was Giuseppe Antonio Gaetani d'Aragona, and his income came from the toll through porta Vallata, from the exclusive right to sell «small hides» and from the equally exclusive right to sharpen the woodcutters' tools; he also had rights of pasture, of fishing in the Matese lake and of stamp on the wool cloth produced. He owned two mills, three oil presses, a tavern, a tannery, nine fulling mills for wool cloth and a dyeworks, besides about four thousand animals, mostly sheep and goats; he lived in the ducal palace of the old centre, which had a theatre and fountains of running water. The town then counted about four thousand five hundred inhabitants in eight hundred and fifty-six families. The name, meanwhile, is older and plainer: in the documents of 977 and 1020 the village is «Pedes de monte», at the foot of the mountain, and until 1970 it was called Piedimonte d'Alife.