Riardo

Riardo has been known since antiquity for its mineral waters, and the water may well be in its name too: one hypothesis derives it from rivus ardens, the burning stream, because that water — probably very sparkling at the time — seemed to burn whoever drank it. Another tells that Hannibal, passing through during the Second Punic War, threw salt on the village and then called it Riardum; other sources start instead from an older Liardo. The etymology is still argued over. On the top of the hill that commands the plain of the Savone stands the castle the Lombards built in the eighth century.

Under the Normans and the Swabians the fief belonged to the Carafa. In 1229, when pope Gregory IX invaded the Terra di Lavoro in support of the barons' rising against Frederick II, the king of Jerusalem passed through Riardo and stayed three days to block the emperor's road. After the Angevin conquest the fief went to Simon of Montfort, and in 1690 it was bought by Gedeone Cafaro, who took from it the title of duke. In the night between the twenty-second and the twenty-third of October 1943 the Germans abandoned the village. Today the springs of the Ferrarelle and Santagata mineral waters are here, and with them the plant that bottles them: the same water the Romans already knew.