Casandrino

The name of this village has long been argued over, and the hypotheses are dismissed one by one, each with its reason. Casa Trina, that is «three houses», is a hybrid of Italian and Latin: it would have been Trecase, not Casatrina. Casa Andropon, from the Greek anthropos, would mean «house of man», but it is too generic to name a town. Androna was the public place where men gathered to talk, and it seems unlikely that the few inhabitants of the time needed a forum of their own. Popular tradition cuts it short: casa di Sandrino, the house of a Sandro who was the first to live and work here. The soundest explanation, though, is Casa Andrena, a safe place closed by walls all round, and it rests on two proofs: the records of the visitations of the bishops of Aversa, which call this territory Casandrenus, and a Norman-period parchment of 1122 in which one Amerigo, son of Ugone of the villa of Casandrena, gives part of his land to the abbess of the monastery of San Biagio.

The village, like all those north of Naples, is of Oscan origin, but the firm news begins in the Roman republican age, with the distribution of the ager publicus: many colonists left Rome to settle in the Neapolitan countryside, receiving land for the payment of a few nummi, and built there the casae, poor dwellings with a yard in front. With the years the casae widened into larger buildings and bigger courtyards, until they made villages and hamlets that took their names from the villas of the patricians or from the colonists who had come first: the casali, which only much later, largely under the duchy of Naples, would become comuni. Casandrino itself, in feudal times, was called simply «Casale», from the number of houses springing up as the land was brought under cultivation.