Panicocolo. Storia, tradizioni e immagini di Villaricca

From the origins of the name Paniscoculi, Panicoculum, Panicocolo, Cuculum to the new name Villaricca; from feudalisation to the last baron and on down to the present day, there unfold the political, social and economic events of this corner of the province of Naples, which has known more misadventures than good fortune, and with it the story of so many people without a face and without a name, who remained anonymous among the anonymous, but who all together made possible the growth of a small village of peasants and craftsmen. The backdrop to the story is the diary of Giulio De Alterio, a parish priest who lived at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who, with the same punctilious meticulousness as a chronicler, noted down most of the events that caught his attention: the storm that destroyed one thousand five hundred barrels of wine, three-year-old Nicola who killed his sister by throwing her into the household latrine, or the banquet of lard, wine, garlic and bread that seventy gypsies were preparing to eat during a funeral. Notes written in uncertain Italian, forgotten for centuries at the bottom of a drawer or among the cobwebs of an attic, which through their reading allow us to reconstruct a cross-section of the life and history of a territory ignored by “great” history