Nola

Nola means «new city»: the Etruscans founded it under the name of Hyria, then the Samnites took it, rebuilt it and called it Nuvla. But underneath lies something older still: in the Croce del Papa district archaeologists have found a Bronze Age village buried all at once by the ash of the Avellino eruption, seventeen hundred years before Christ — a Pompeii of prehistory. The people fled, and came back to live here a few decades later. In Roman Nola, which Octavian had made a colony under the name of Nolana Colonia Felix Augusta, Augustus died: Suetonius writes apud Nolam, «near Nola», and it is that «near» that the neighbouring towns still argue over. Then, in 410, Alaric came: he sacked the city and carried off the bishop, Paulinus, as a prisoner.

It is from that homecoming that the feast is born. Every June eight wooden obelisks twenty-five metres high, plus a smaller one called the Barca, dance on the shoulders of teams of more than a hundred men through the streets of the old town: the feast of the Gigli, a heritage of humanity, thanks Saint Paulinus for the return of the prisoners. And the people of Nola took it with them: at Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, the Gigli have been raised since 1903. Of Paulinus tradition says one more thing: that it was he who introduced bells into the liturgy — and the bell is in the city's arms, ringed by five insects that some read as cicadas and others as bees. In 1548 Giordano Bruno was born here, and the statue raised to him in the square was presented again to the public with an address written by Giovanni Bovio and a letter of praise from the prime minister. The Orsini palace, built in part with stones from the temples and amphitheatres of ancient Nola, is the courthouse today; and two kilometres away the early Christian basilicas of Cimitile are unique in the faith of the beginnings.