Mugnano di Napoli

Mugnano means «fortified place»: from the Latin munire, to protect, because a locus munitus stood here on the northern edge of the Duchy of Naples. It was a frontier, and the neighbouring town, Melito, carries in its name the ditch that marked it. The first document naming Mugnano is a notarial deed of 955, which records in loco Muniani some plots of land and a piscina, that is a water reservoir; another, a few years later, gives its exact position, north of the chapel of Santa Maria Assunta al Trivio. In old documents the name is written six different ways: Munianum, Mugnanum, Mungnanum, Mognano, Mongano, Moiano. Frederick II recognised Mugnano as a demanial universitas, a community depending on no feudal lord and dealing directly with Naples.

From a farming village Mugnano became a summer resort of the Neapolitan noble families, and some of them settled here: the first prince of Canosa was born here, in 1684. And in 1789, in palazzo Dentice, a circle for the study of antiquity used to meet, attended by the marquis Michele Arditi, who was superintendent of excavations for the Kingdom and director of the Archaeological Museum of Naples: in a village of farmsteads they discussed Pompeii. The church of San Biagio, which stands between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, keeps a Madonna of the Rosary by Paolo De Matteis; the patron is celebrated in February, with the blessing of throats. Today Mugnano is a town of trade and of dwelling in the northern belt, with a textile market among the busiest in the area: the metro and the main roads put Naples, Capodichino and the Aversa countryside minutes away.