Frattamaggiore

To its own people it is simply Fratta, and the name says what was here before: fracta, the scrubland, the uncultivated ground of thorns and gullies that Benedictine monks received as gifts from lords and handed to settlers on favourable terms. The coat of arms still remembers it, with a black boar on a dark field. But the town proper was born of a flight: around 850 a colony of refugees from Miseno, driven out when the Saracens destroyed their coastal city, joined the woodcutters of the Fracta. They brought hemp, the first spinning frames and the cult of saint Sossius, their fellow townsman, to whom they raised a temple; and there is still a district here called via Miseno. The three red crosses on the arms are the three colonies the refugees came from: Miseno, Cumae and Atella.

Everything else came out of those spinning frames. The ropemakers of Fratta were already selling cordage in Naples under the Angevins, and under the Spanish the hawsers of Frattamaggiore were exported across the whole empire: they are believed to have sailed with Columbus's ships as well. The village belonged to the crown and had never been subject to feudal lords, and when in 1630 it was granted in fief to the baron of Sangro its inhabitants bought themselves back within three years. The first document naming the place dates from 923; the addition of Maggiore, greater, distinguishes it from the lesser Fratta, today's Frattaminore. A city since 1902, it keeps in the basilica of San Sossio the remains of its patron and those of saint Severinus, which is why it has borne the title of Benedictine city since the end of the twentieth century.