Liveri

Liveri is the least populous comune of the metropolitan city of Naples, and on its origins the scholars agree about nothing except one thing: whoever founded the village, they were people who had arrived from somewhere else. For the historian Ambrogio Leone, writing around 1500, it was the people of Nola on the hill of Cicala who came down to the plain, and while some joined Marzano and Casamarciano, others founded San Paolo, Bardi and Liberi — that is, Liveri. Another version speaks of Nolans fleeing the Goths of Alaric; yet another of slaves restored to freedom, hence Civitas Liberorum. And then there is the finest story, argued by professor Felice Ianniciello: after Cannae, Hannibal camped his troops on the plateau running from San Paolo to Liveri and Marzano, and the common people of Nola, hostile to their own senate, sent a delegation to offer him the city. The Romans won, and about seventy of those delegates were put to the sword; the exiled Nolans stayed in the camp, and from there came the group that called itself Liberi, free of the Romans. Of all this a name survives on the ground: people still call that flat stretch the field of Hannibal.

Documented history begins much later, in 1514, when the Madonna is said to have appeared several times to Autilia Scala, a local shepherd girl. Since then the village has lived around the sanctuary of Santa Maria a Parete, built in that century and adorned between 1603 and 1607 by the Nolan patrician Girolamo Barone, who was carrying out his mother's testamentary wishes. The design kept intact only the wall with the ancient icon of the Virgin and built around it a rectangular little temple, made in the likeness of the Holy House of Loreto, which Belisario Corenzio frescoed. On the night of 29 January 1989 an arson fire destroyed part of the sanctuary, later rebuilt: the little temple survived, the sixteenth-century canvases did not. On the arms, granted in 2005, stands the title Civitas Mariae.