San Prisco

The territory of San Prisco lay largely inside the walls of ancient Capua, and the rest served as the city's necropolis. Near the edge of the walls, at the place called Ponte di San Prisco, the remains of a fourth-century-BC necropolis came to light, and in the nineteen-seventies several Samnite tombs, some of them painted, rich in pottery, in personal ornaments and even in gold. On the slopes of the Tifata, instead, were the cisterns and aqueducts that supplied Capua with water, and the places of worship. In 1997 the archaeological superintendency found, at the place called Costa delle Monache, the structure of the ancient temple of Jupiter of Capua, datable between the third and the second century before Christ: it is the same discovery that proved right, more than a century late, the town of Casagiove, which in the nineteenth century had renamed itself precisely on the conviction that a temple of Jupiter had stood there.

The village grew around the church of its first bishop. Tradition says that Priscus had come to Capua with Saint Peter from Antioch in Syria and had stopped to preach along the via Acquaria — the road Augustus had built to bring to Capua the acqua Julia, which rose at the foot of the Taburno, over towards Sant'Agata de' Goti — and that a woman named Matrona found his bones along that road and obtained leave to build him a church. The date is argued over: some historians give 506, others the fifth century, and the first official source remains a Lombard parchment of 1020. In the second half of the fifteen-forties a religious movement of Calvinist inspiration spread through the Capuan casali; from 1552 the repression was very hard, with trials, seizures of the adherents' goods and the capillary work of the parish priests. San Prisco was the casale with the greatest number of accused: thirty-one.