Boscotrecase

Here there is a villa that Vesuvius has buried twice. In 1903 the villa of Agrippa Postumus was discovered, son of Agrippa and of Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus: the eruption of 79 after Christ had covered it, and the excavation work was interrupted by the eruption of 1906, which reburied much of it. The frescoes of the third Pompeian style that the archaeologists had time to save are today in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Roman times this whole wooded belt was called Pagus Felix Suburbanus, in honour of Lucius Cornelius Sulla who had himself called Felix, and then Pagus Augustus Felix Suburbanus under Augustus: it was the pleasant outskirts of Pompeii, and villas of otium were built here.

The name of the town, instead, counts three houses. After the eruption of 79 the territory stayed abandoned for a long time and from Vesuvius down to the sea grew a thick wood, which they called Silva mala. Around the year one thousand there was a little church dedicated to San Gennaro inside the fief of the baron of Ottaviano; in the first half of the thirteenth century Frederick II detached a vast area from that fief to make it his own hunting reserve, then the territory went back to the baron, and on 28 March 1337 Robert of Anjou detached it again — this time to give it to the three women's monasteries founded by his wife Sancia of Aragon: Santa Chiara, Santa Maria Egiziaca and Santa Maria Maddalena. From that the name Bosci Trium Domorum, the wood of the three religious houses, which in time became Boscotrecase. Then the three houses quarrelled: in 1696 a dispute broke out among the monasteries over the boundaries of the Silva mala, and the cardinal of Naples Giacomo Cantelmo charged the architect and the surveyor of the Sacro Regio Consiglio with re-establishing them following the Angevin documents of 1337, three centuries and a half later. In the eighteenth century the village lived on stone: from the Vesuvian slabs came the paving of the streets of the Kingdom of Naples, and the stonecutters of Bosco were wanted everywhere.