Santa Maria a Vico

This town is a road. The Romans built it in the middle of the Second Samnite War, for military purposes; then, once the military function was over and the Appian Way opened to everyone's traffic, the place filled with houses and eating places for those passing through, and the new settlement took the name Vicus Novanensis. Santa Maria a Vico still today develops entirely along the Appia, the ancient one and the new, to the point that apart from the state road there are no other ways out: hence a difficult traffic and one of the highest population densities in the province of Caserta. Destroyed by the barbarians and rebuilt, the town depended on Nola and on Arienzo until the French made it an autonomous comune.

The festivals hold tight to that past. On 15 August the Madonna Assunta goes out with the votive carts that make the round of the whole town, and every twenty-five years the statue kept in the basilica is carried in procession — the church of Santa Maria Assunta was raised to a minor basilica by Pius XII in 1957 — drawn by white oxen. On 14 August, instead, a historical procession parades in Aragonese costume, with the flag-throwers, and in the evening the centuries-old tradition of the Mastro Mercato is brought back to life. In piazza Umberto I there are four bronze statues dedicated to the trades of long ago: the embroiderer, the shoemaker, the day labourers and the emigrant.