Sant'Egidio del Monte Albino

'O surdato 'nnammurato, the Neapolitan song everyone knows, seems to have been born in a ground-floor room of Villa Califano, where Aniello Califano had set up a sort of small conservatory. He settled there in 1915, the very year of the lyrics; he died there of smallpox in 1919, and the frightened village demanded that his furniture be burnt, and even the cart that carried his coffin.

Much further back in time goes the Fonte Helvius: a block of Roman marble on which the god Sarnus is carved twice, as a youth on one side and as a grown man on the other, the river at its source and at its mouth. It is fed by an ancient aqueduct running twenty metres underground. Above it, the abbey of Santa Maria Maddalena in Armillis grew on a Roman farm villa still visible in the crypt.