San Marcellino

This village bears somebody else's saint. Born around the sixth century under the Lombards, it was called Tre Torri; then a violent earthquake destroyed the nearby village of Sant'Anastasio, which stood between Casapesenna and Tre Torri, and the survivors moved here. With them came people from farther away, and in particular the inhabitants of Piedimonte d'Alife, whose patron is Saint Marcellinus, priest and martyr. The village grew a great deal and, almost certainly under the pressure of the newcomers, placed itself under the protection of their saint and changed its name: from Tre Torri to San Marcellino. The mother church, dedicated to him, was built in 1125 over an earlier chapel.

The village lay on a border, between the Lombard duchies of Capua and of Naples, and precisely for that reason it enjoyed a certain autonomy until the arrival of Rainulf Drengot, the Norman who founded Aversa. In 862 San Marcellino was at the centre of a clash between Landone II and Paldone; the quarrels went on and the boundaries of Naples came to include Lusciano, Frignano and San Marcellino, so that the Liburia split in two — the ducal one, Neapolitan, to which the village belonged, and the Lombard one of Capua. The fields had names of their own, the field of Sant'Arcangelo, that of San Giovanni, that of the Monk, and a public road crossed the contrada Bignola near the place called Cucumari, so named because watermelons were grown there. In 1927, with the province of Terra di Lavoro suppressed, the comune was merged into today's Trentola Ducenta and its territory reduced in favour of its neighbours: it was re-established in 1946.