Crispano

The list of the feudal lords of Crispano reads like a family tree, because the fief moved above all by marriage. In 1393 it belonged to Carlo Ruffo, count of Corigliano and Montalto, who in 1399 sold it to Gorello Origlia, doctor of law, counsellor of king Ladislaus and grand protonotary of the kingdom of Naples; in 1406 Origlia passed it to his second son Roberto. In 1616 don Sancio de Strada bought the casale and became its marquis; then, in 1699, through the marriage of Giovanna di Soria with Giovanni Tovar, marquis of San Marcellino, Crispano went to the Tovar — the same family that had been the first to hold San Marcellino in fief — and in 1712, through the marriage of Teresa Tovar with Fulcantonio Ruffo, it went to the princes of Scilla. In 1806 Joseph Bonaparte's laws abolished feudal rights and in their place came the municipal administration.

The mother church of San Gregorio Magno is of late medieval origin and has been altered more than once, but it keeps two paintings worth the stop: a Madonna del Rosario by Luca Giordano, dated 1672, and a San Gregorio Magno invoking the end of the plague in Rome by Paolo De Majo, of 1735. The name of the village is older than all this: for the nineteenth-century toponymist Giovanni Flechia it comes from the gens Crispia, and the first official document in which the word Crispanum appears is of 936. Around it lies the plain that the ancients called Campania Felix for its fertility, and part of the territory is still farmed; the masserie, which were the economic and social centre of the countryside, lost that role in the course of the twentieth century and slowly declined.