Caivano

Caivano too bears a landowner's name: fundus Calvanium, the estate of the Calvanium family. The territory was that of Atella, the city that gave Italy the fabulae Atellanae, the Oscan farces from which the commedia dell'arte descends; and the Romans squared it twice, with the Gracchan centuriation and the Augustan one. The first can still be read, if you know where to look: it decided where the churches and the castle tower would stand. That castle, under Alfonso of Aragon, held out three months of siege before surrendering.

The religious heart is the sanctuary of Maria Santissima di Campiglione, where a Byzantine fresco is venerated showing the Madonna with raised arms among the twelve apostles: a place of pilgrimage since the miracle of 1483, celebrated on the second Sunday of May. But Caivano's finest story is one of milk: at the end of the nineteenth century Maria Consiglia Zampella was born here, wet nurse to Peppino De Filippo — and for once the roles were reversed, because she did not go to Naples: Luisa De Filippo brought the child here and came to visit him for four years with Eduardo and Titina. Peppino always called her his second mother. Today Caivano is known across Italy for the Parco Verde, the estate built in the eighties with the funds for those displaced by the Irpinia earthquake and conceived as a symbol of rebirth. Around it remain the old farmsteads and the tomato plain, with Naples twelve kilometres one way and Caserta thirteen the other.