Santa Maria la Fossa

Livy calls this place Fossa Graeca, and in antiquity the area was famous for growing roses. The village arose around the year one thousand as a hamlet of Capua, and took the name of the Madonna from the Romanesque-Lombard church that some Capuan lords had built here in 1084. In 1525 Charles V granted the fossatari the privilege of grazing their animals freely in the area without fear of violence: that is probably why no trace of walls has ever been found around the settlement.

Until 1907 it was a hamlet of Grazzanise, and then a comune in its own right. Its first mayor, Antimo Abbate, felt — as did some of his fellow citizens — that the suffix «la Fossa», the ditch, was less than honourable, and had the council vote to rename the village Santa Maria a Volturno: the name, however, was never actually changed. Between the wars the Opera Nazionale Combattenti handed the reclaimed land to war veterans, rebuilt the mouth works of the Regi Lagni, raised the Volturno embankments and installed pumping stations. In 1943 the village was mined and largely burned: the church of the Assunta lost its bell tower, later rebuilt detached from the building.