On the evening of 16 January, at Novoli, they set fire to a mountain of vine shoots. It is the focara: it can reach 25 metres in height, it is unique of its kind in Italy and perhaps one of the largest in Europe, and it is lit after the procession, with fireworks. It is built afresh every year, and those who build it change its shape: sometimes they leave a passage through the middle, the gallery, and the saint goes through it in procession. The feast of Sant'Antonio Abate begins on 6 January and ends on the 18th with the festa dei paesani and the sagra te lu puercu. The vine shoots, moreover, are no accident: the countryside of Novoli is almost all olive groves and vineyards, and this is Negroamaro country, so much so that the comune lies inside the park that takes its name from that wine.
The name of the village, on the other hand, is the one people gave it, not the documents. For the philologist Gerhard Rohlfs, Novoli comes from the Latin Novulum-Novale, the field to be ploughed; but the exact name of the fief was Santa Maria de Novis, and it was the villagers and the outsiders who used the other one. Until the unification of Italy the arms had quite a different subject: the Madonna of Constantinople with the Child in her lap, and it would be precisely the Marian devotion that explains the name. The village is said to have been born around three very ancient churches, San Salvatore, San Giovanni and Santa Maria Madre di Dio, by the work of the inhabitants of the casale of Porziano, who moved here from a marshy area nearby. But the traces are older: in the caves of Cardamone fossil bones of the upper Pleistocene and chipped Neolithic flints, in contrada Pietragrossa a Bronze Age menhir, and two tombs of the sixth century before Christ. From 1520 in co-ownership and from 1532 alone, the fief belonged to the Mattei, who built the baronial palace and several churches, among them the octagonal San Salvatore; then to the Carignani, until feudalism was abolished in 1806.
