Pontelatone

The comune is made of a capoluogo and four frazioni, and one of them, Treglia, sits on top of an ancient city: the archaeological site of Trebula Balliensis is there, and from that city the chain of the Trebulani mountains takes its name too — at the foot of which, below Monte Friento, stands Pontelatone. The village itself is far younger: it was probably born in the middle of the tenth century, in the years when people were putting themselves inside castles. In the Norman period it belonged to the barony of Formicola, whose feudatory was a certain Manasseus; from 1189 to 1268 it was held by the Montefuscolo; then, under the Angevins, by Emanuele Freapane. And in 1268, after the battle of Tagliacozzo, Charles II did something unusual with this land: he assigned the barony of Formicola not to a man but to a city, Capua.

In 1465 Ferrante I of Aragon granted the barony, and with it Pontelatone, to Diomede I Carafa: a capable man of arms, but above all a respected humanist. It is held that his presence is what brought the greatest artists and humanists of the day into this small barony, and what explains why a territory of this size has Catalan Gothic work in it. He was succeeded by his son Gian Tommaso, who remodelled the fabric of the convent of the Annunciation and increased its revenues too, and who together with his own son Diomede II embellished the castle the Marzano had built — and then went to live in it. Between 1547 and 1549 the count of Maddaloni granted Gian Tommaso a privilege worth understanding properly: the portolania, weights and measures, over Maddaloni, Pontelatone, Formicola, Sasso and other places. In practice, the right to decide how much a pound weighed and how long a rod was: the most everyday power a lord could hold in his hand. In 1590 a report of the visits ad limina of the diocese of Caiazzo notes that in the territory of Pontelatone there was a church of the Annunziata open for worship.