Villa Literno

This comune carries the name of a place that is somewhere else. Until 1927 it was called Vico di Pantano, from the marshy ground that surrounded it; when fascism suppressed the province of Terra di Lavoro and moved it into that of Naples, the town took the name Villa Literno, which recalls the archaeological site of Liternum — which however lies on the shores of Lake Patria, in a frazione of Giugliano in Campania, that is, in another comune. In Roman times the place was called Vicus Feniculensis, from the first crops of the area, grown for the production of hay, and the via Feniculense still keeps the name; it is supposed to have been raised to a diocese in Constantinian times and, with Cumae and Atella, to have been one of the episcopal seats incorporated in 1053 into the diocese of Aversa. After 1268 Charles I of Anjou promoted the building of the castle, as a hunting reserve; of the stronghold there remain the ruins of the one raised around 1460. For the rest, the history of this plain is reclamation: begun by the viceroy Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, it went on for centuries and is not finished yet.

After the war the reclaimed lands made Villa Literno one of the capitals of intensive agriculture, above all of tomatoes, and one of the main poles of foreign immigration in Italy: many came, mostly Africans, looking for work as day labourers. They worked under the caporalato and lodged in makeshift shelters, farmhouses without services, which little by little became what everyone called the ghetto; and living side by side with the local population soon took conflictual forms. In 1989 Jerry Masslo, a South African refugee working the tomato harvest, was killed in a shooting during a robbery against the immigrants: the case had an enormous echo in Italian public opinion and closed with a state funeral. In 1994 the ghetto was destroyed by an arson fire, which the bishop of Caserta Raffaele Nogaro called a «state fire».