Castiglione del Genovesi

Until 1862 the village was called simply Castiglione, a name that says what stood here: a fortification, probably part of the Lombard defensive network over the Picentini mountains. Then a royal decree of the twenty-third of October 1862 added «del Genovesi» to it, and the reason is in a house in the centre. Here, on the first of November 1713, was born Antonio Genovesi, the son of a local shoemaker. From 1754 he held at the university of Naples the chair of commerce and mechanics, which was the first public chair of political economy in Europe, funded by the Tuscan patron Bartolomeo Intieri; and he was also the first professor not to lecture in Latin, but in Italian. His Lezioni di commercio o sia d'economia civile are of 1765. The rest of the village is older than he is: like almost all the centres of the Picentini, Castiglione was born of the scattering of the people of Picentia, destroyed by the Romans around the year 88 before Christ.

In 1824, during farm work in the Pomara district, a small temple came to light with inscriptions in ancient Greek and, on a pedestal, the statue of a pythia, that is of a priestess: that statue ended up in Naples, kept by a private family, and one mayor of the village spent his term trying to have it back here at least for a day. On the town's coat of arms there are three hills with as many towers, and they are the three mountains that close the village in: the Monna, the Montecchia and the Tubenna. On the Tubenna stands the abbey of Maria Santissima, and the most important feast of the year is the procession that climbs up to it on the Tuesday after Easter. Even a road tells something: the one coming from San Mango is called Pistelli, from the pestelli, the wooden stakes driven into the ground that marked the boundaries between private properties and the lands of the comune.