What to see · Acerra

More places of interest

• Museo della Maschera di Pulcinella

  The Pulcinella Mask Museum is housed in the Castle of the Counts of Acerra, also called the Baronial Castle, on piazza Castello. It is one of the richest museums devoted to the Pulcinella mask.

  What to see

  According to tradition, reported by a sixteenth-century text and by a famous painting attributed to Ludovico Carracci, the town gave birth to the celebrated mask of Pulcinella, later adopted by the Neapolitans. Besides the numerous testimonies on the life and history of the Neapolitan icon, the museum is characterised by its multimedia approach and by involving visitors in impromptu performances with Pulcinella.

  The castle that houses it was described in the fifteenth century by the poet Rogeri de Pacienza, when Princess Isabella Del Balzo, wife of Frederick I of Naples, stayed there during her wedding journey from Canosa di Puglia to Naples. Destroyed by the Lombards in 834, it became a fief of the Aquino until the thirteenth century; Manfred of Sicily lived there, as a document of 1255 attests. It then passed to Roberto Sanseverino and to Gorello Aurilia, who embellished it to host Giacomo de La Marche, consort of Queen Joanna II, and it also hosted Giacomo Attendolo. In 1421 it was besieged by the Aragonese but not taken, thanks to the brave resistance of the people of Acerra, with condottieri such as Niccolò Piccinino and Braccio da Montone; it was later besieged by Ferrante I, who seized it after the Barons' Conspiracy. Passed to the de Cardenas and finally to the Spinelli, it was bought in 1925 by the Comune, of which it became the seat, together with numerous museums; today it also houses the Museum of Archaeology and Local History of Acerra and Suessula, inaugurated in 2023. Under the old stables traces of a theatre of the second century BC have been found.

  Visiting

  The museum is in the Castle of the Counts, on piazza Castello, in Acerra. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.

  Our editors' tip

  In the Baronial Castle, on piazza Castello, there is also the Library of the Museum of Pulcinella, folklore and peasant civilisation, which holds fifteen hundred volumes and pamphlets and fifty nineteenth-century editions.

• Scavi archeologici di Suessula

  Suessula, also called Suessola, was an ancient city of Campania, founded in the ninth century BC and of Oscan and Etruscan origin, in the locality of Calabricito, in the north-eastern part of the comune of Acerra. Destroyed by the Saracens, it was never rebuilt, and after its abandonment its memory was almost lost until it was rediscovered in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  What to see

  It stood in a strategic position, near the river Riullo and crossed by the via Popilia, the most important road of antiquity in southern Italy. It was dominated by the Oscans and then by the Etruscans, who included it in a dodecapolis with other ancient Campanian centres, and it was the scene of battles between Samnites and Romans: in 341 BC under its walls the Romans, led by the consul Marcus Valerius Corvus, defeated the Samnites. In 339 BC it became Roman territory as a civitas sine suffragio; in the Republican age it was a municipium, then a prefecture after the ruin of Capua, and finally a military colony by decree of Sulla. In the early Middle Ages it was an episcopal seat and the seat of a Lombard gastaldate, and in 880 it was destroyed by the Saracens; the remains of the old cathedral stayed visible until the end of the eighteenth century, and as late as 1028 a notarial deed shows it still inhabited.

  The place was then covered by a wood, the «Calabricito», which King Ferdinand I made a hunting reserve; in 1778 he had a villa built there, the «Casina Spinelli», named after the counts who owned it. The first excavations were undertaken from 1872 to 1886 by the Spinelli counts of Scalea, and the many finds were placed in the villa, which became one of the richest private museums of the period, visited by many Italian and foreign scholars, among them Amedeo Maiuri, Giulio De Petra, Giulio Minervini and Friedrich von Duhn. Most of the collection was later donated by the Spinelli widow to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, where it is displayed in the Prehistoric Section as the «Spinelli Collection»; the villa is protected as an asset of historical and archaeological interest.

  Visiting

  The excavations are at Calabricito, in the north-eastern part of the comune of Acerra. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them, for example on the website of the Urban Park of the ancient city of Suessola, parcourbanoanticacittadisuessola.it.

  Our editors' tip

  On 19 October 2023 the Archaeological Museum of Acerra and Suessula was inaugurated, where the finds of the area can be looked for.

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