Prata Sannita

Prata Sannita is two villages. The first was born out of fear: between the ninth and tenth centuries Saracen raids drove the people of ancient Prata Piana to take refuge on the hill overlooking the river Lete, where a powerful castle and a fortified borgo were built — this is the Prata Inferiore still to be seen, with its walls. The second was born out of work, and much later: towards the end of the sixteenth century, five hundred metres away, on the plateau that looks over the plain, the farm workers built themselves straw huts in an area that for this reason was called Pagliara, and from there grew today's Prata Superiore, which as it spread took in the church of San Pancrazio and the convent of San Francesco, commissioned by Scipione Pandone and inaugurated in 1480, where he asked to be buried. The Pandone were lords of Prata from 1334 for about two centuries; in the sixteenth century the village reached seventeen hundred inhabitants, more than it has now.

Beneath all this there is something much older. At Cerasa, in a commanding position over the plain and along the road that led towards Bojano and Isernia, stands the Muro delle Fate, the wall of the fairies: a Samnite megalithic wall, thought to have been a small temple. And at Pantani Fragneto the volunteers of the local archaeological group have gathered chipped stone tools going back to the middle Palaeolithic, that is to some seventy thousand years ago, when Neanderthal man was here. The name may come from the prata legionum, the fields of the Roman legions; the adjective «Sannita» was added in 1862 so as not to confuse it with Prata di Principato Ultra, and the first mention of the place name is of 958, in the Chronicon of the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno. On the Tabula Peutingeriana Prata does not appear: between Allifae and Aesernia the map marked only the posting stations.