Marigliano

In the heart of the Nola countryside, Marigliano still carries the mark of its feudal lords: the ducal palace, with its cylindrical towers and its park, passed from the Carafa to the last dukes, and remains the emblem of a town that was once an important county of the Kingdom. The name probably comes from a Roman family, the Mari, rewarded with these lands after the Social War; the first document that mentions the place is a deed of donation on parchment from 917. The fief changed hands constantly, and once went under the hammer like a piece of furniture, when a Carafa died leaving debts: a Neapolitan banker bought it. Its unluckiest lord fared worse still: in 1197 Henry VI had Richard of Acerra dragged through the streets of Capua by a horse, and then hanged upside down.

Under the Mastrilli, who held the duchy for a century and a half, Marigliano had a revolt of its vassals, with taxes too high and the duke forced to shut himself up in the convent of San Vito, and a literary academy, founded by Isabella Mastrilli. Domenico Antonio Vaccaro worked in the collegiate church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and its bell tower, of tuff, red brick and lava stone, was crowned by a little dome of yellow and green majolica: it came down in the earthquake of 1980 and has been rebuilt exactly as it was. All around lies the plain of vegetables and fruit that has always supplied Naples, and it was the countryside that gave the town its bitterest page: in the nineteen-fifties the Colorado beetle destroyed the potato harvest for years on end, and in June 1959 the farmers' protest ended with the town hall in flames. Nola of the Gigli and the early Christian basilicas of Cimitile are a short step away.