Valle di Maddaloni

The name says only what it is: a valley, with Maddaloni added to say which one. The village grew up around an early-medieval castle that had to hold out against raids by Goths, Vandals and Saracens, and the medieval plan is still visible in the main street with its side branches. What is chiefly known about the castle is that it kept changing hands: Caetani, Della Ratta, Catalans, the house of Artois. In 1470 Francesco della Ratta sold the fief to a namesake of his for one thousand five hundred ducats, a sum so low that it looks more like a gift than a sale. Then came the plague: from a little over three thousand souls in 1620 the village fell below five hundred.

What lifted it again was a king's water. Charles of Bourbon bought the Terra di Valle in 1753 because the water meant for the palace at Caserta had to pass through here: work on the Ponti had begun the year before and was finished in 1759, and those are the arches of the Carolino aqueduct designed by Vanvitelli. A century later, on the first of October 1860, it was at the Ponti della Valle that the battle of the Volturno was fought between Nino Bixio's garibaldini and the Bourbon army; beside the arches there is now an ossuary for the dead. The greatest Bourbon work in this village became the place where the Bourbons lost.