Castelnuovo di Conza

Castelnuovo di Conza stands at 650 metres in the upper Sele valley, on the pass known as the sella di Conza: a crossing which, between the valleys of the Sele, the Ofanto and the Calore, linked the Adriatic side to the Tyrrhenian, and Campania and Irpinia to Lucania. The name comes from castrum novum, the new castle, and the qualifier «di Conza» serves to tell it apart from Castelnuovo Cilento. Of the castle, which probably rebuilt a Lombard structure guarding the border with the Byzantines, a chronicle of the late seventeenth century still recalled the strong tower.

On 23 November 1980 Castelnuovo was the village nearest the epicentre of the Irpinia earthquake: the ground shook for ninety seconds, eighty-six people died and eighty per cent of the houses were destroyed, beginning with the old part on the spur, the one with the castle on top. It was not the first time: the chronicles record the quake of 1466 and the devastating one of 1694. The rest of the story lies in departures: the great emigration to America between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, then Latin America, northern Europe and northern Italy, and traders from Castelnuovo who in the twentieth century reached from Asia to Africa. Today people live by farming and stock-raising, and wind turbines turn on the exposed ridges.