Calvizzano

On the municipal gonfalone there is a bald head, in profile, and it illustrates an etymology. It was proposed in the seventeenth century by the notary Marco Antonio Syrleto, the first local historian: in antiquity, after so many wars and plagues, many tombs were found in this place containing nothing but skulls, which were called calvi; when healthy people, sani, later came to live here, from the joining of the calvi and the sani the name Calvisano was born, which common speech turned into Carvizzano and at last into Calvizzano. The scholars' explanation is more prosaic: a landowner named Calvisius, of the gens Calvisia. The arms are in any case older than 1596, because they are found carved in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, begun in 1580.

In 1799 the admiral Francesco Caracciolo hid here. During the Neapolitan revolution he had fought against the royal fleet and against the Bourbon restoration, and after the repression of the Republic he took refuge at Calvizzano, which had been his family's fief; he was found out through the betrayal of a servant, arrested on 29 June and taken aboard admiral Nelson's ship, the Foudroyant, where a summary trial condemned him to death by hanging. The village also keeps much older things: the church of San Giacomo Apostolo is named in a document of 911 and had risen beside a monumental Roman tomb — it was the first church in Naples and its country dedicated to that saint, who is the patron here. The church of San Pietro, on the other hand, was rebuilt in 1656, the year of the plague: the faithful had left the village for the open country and there had asked the saint for protection from the disease; the danger past, with their offerings they enlarged and adorned the old church.