Presenzano

The Samnites built on these heights a first network of settlements, fortified with megalithic walls to defend and watch the passes towards Sesto Campano and the plain of Cesima. In the Middle Ages, for the same strategic reasons, the people went up onto the hill, and a castle was built there too — built inside the Samnite enclosure, using its walls as its own structure. The first document about the castle is of 1091, when Pandolfo di Teano lived in it; today it is a ruin, but the remains of the keep and of the wall with its square and cylindrical towers can still be seen. Down in the plain, at the locality of Taverna San Felice, there was Rufrae, a Samnite centre on the road that linked the Abruzzo with the Tyrrhenian coast: it came to light while trenches were being dug for irrigation pipes — votive clay statuettes of the sixth century before Christ, a stretch of wall in polygonal blocks probably from the time of the Samnite wars, a small amphitheatre, a necropolis and a sanctuary, the last two older than the Roman conquest. The name of the village is Roman too: it comes from the gentile name Praesentius.

The village was Lombard, then Norman — in 1097 it was under Landenolfo, count of Teano — then the barony was joined to that of Vairano and passed through the Caetani d'Anagni, Bartolomeo di Capua, the d'Aquino and the d'Avalos; and on the twenty-eighth of June 1616, by deed of the Neapolitan notary Gramazio de Amodeo, Decio del Balzo bought the fief, which stayed with his family until feudalism was overthrown. Then something happened that the village has not finished with yet. Presenzano had always been in Terra di Lavoro; after the expedition of the Thousand it was moved, together with twelve other comuni, into the province of Campobasso; and in 1878 the comune of Presenzano alone came back to Terra di Lavoro. That old border can still be seen: the village football club plays in a Molise league. And under the hill, between 1979 and 1990, Enel built the hydroelectric station named after Domenico Cimarosa: two basins of about seven million cubic metres each, five hundred metres of head between them, a thousand megawatts, at a cost of about a thousand billion lire — the largest in Italy and the second in Europe. The president of the Republic came to open it.