It was a casale of Piedimonte, the Casale Sancti Potiti, and on Piedimonte it depended for everything: in 1417 even the little parish church was suppressed and absorbed, because the revenues were poor and the inhabitants few; they gave it back only in 1601. A first, limited autonomy came in 1615, the definitive separation in 1749. And yet, when the village made arms of its own, it kept in them one of the three cypresses that stand in the arms of Piedimonte, in memory of the bond. Its shield is a single cypress growing on a hill: a third of the coat of arms of the town it had just left.
The name comes from Potitus, a saint of the second century whose relics were discovered at Tricarico and carried to Benevento, whence the cult spread. In the locality of Torrelle lie the remains of a large Roman villa that had its own baths; the mother church, very plain, was rebuilt after the earthquake of the fifth of June 1688; along the provincial road that cuts the village in two stand the small palaces of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Between 1927 and 1945 San Potito belonged to the province of Benevento, because the fascist government had abolished the province of Caserta altogether. From the war it came out with no bomb damage and no fighting on the spot: it served as a mustering base for a battalion of the British Coldstream Guards, joined here in the spring of 1944 by a company of the Scots Guards — the same units that a few weeks later, at Monte Piccolo, took very heavy losses to seize the hill and open the road towards Rome.
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📅 Every year, on 10 February
On 10 February San Potito Sannitico celebrates its patron Saint Potitus, whose name also appears in the municipality's name; the Parco Nazionale del Matese lies in its territory.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Potito Sannitico, but an easy day trip away.
