Santa Maria Capua Vetere

Here stood ancient Capua, which Cicero called altera Roma, the other Rome, in a land the Romans called felix. And here, in 73 BC, the revolt of Spartacus began. But not in the Campanian amphitheatre, the town's most famous monument — second in size only to the Colosseum, and probably its model — because that one is far later. Spartacus is tied to the other one, the republican amphitheatre, raised in the second century BC: it is among the oldest in Italy, and it is still there.

The modern town, on the other hand, was born of a disaster. In 841 the Saracens sacked Capua; part of the inhabitants fled to where Capua stands today, the others stayed, and throughout the Middle Ages used the Campanian amphitheatre as a refuge: they lived inside it. From the twelfth century the settlement was reborn out of three hamlets grown up around three Christian basilicas, and it is from those that today's Santa Maria Capua Vetere comes. The underground mithraeum, with its fresco of the god slaying the bull, is among the best preserved in the world; the early Christian cathedral lines up ancient columns. At the town's gates, on the first of October 1860, the battle of the Volturno was fought between Bourbon and Garibaldian troops: the square you enter the amphitheatre from carried that date as its name for years. And there is a building that has changed trade four times: the monastery of San Francesco di Paola, where in the seventeen hundreds the soldiers of a Bourbon regiment were quartered, which a decree turned into a prison in 1807, and which then, once the new prison was built outside town, became a university faculty.