Two thousand years carved in tuff

Casale stands on the western slopes of the dormant volcano of Roccamonfina. Its most intense eruptive phases date back about 350,000 years — the same era as the famous Ciampate del Diavolo, the footprints of Homo heidelbergensis pressed into still-warm volcanic mud.

The hill on which the village rises was formed around 50,000 years ago, during the final phases of the Roccamonfina. The result: pyroclastic deposits and leucitic tephrite that gave the land two gifts — a hyper-fertile soil for vines, olives, chestnuts and cherries, and the tuff itself, the architectural DNA of the village from the humblest farmhouse to the Marian Sanctuary.

The name Casale comes from the Latin casa — a modest rural cluster. The village as it stands today is the fusion of three once-separate nuclei.

• Vignali — the oldest nucleus, on the upper ground. It grew not for defence but to tend the "soft vines" planted on the volcanic slopes.
• Casale di mezzo — formed downhill from Vignali as the population grew. From it comes the collective name "alli Casali".
• S. Janni — the third district, at the bottom, founded by survivors of the 1656 plague who fled S. Janni a ponte Campano. They named it after the village they had lost.

The great pestilence decimated the Kingdom of Naples and destroyed the nearby village of S. Janni a ponte Campano. The few survivors, left with nothing, made their way uphill and were taken in by the people of "alli Casali". That act of integration gave birth to the unified identity of the village — a rare example of a community born from below, out of economic need and solidarity rather than a feudal decree.

In the hall of an old house of the Lasco family — once the residence of the powerful Rozzera family, still bearing fragments of frescoes depicting a red rampant lion — a marble epigraph from 1629 commemorates Luigi Antonio Di Leonardo.

D. O. M. ALOYSIO ANTONIO DE LEONARDO VNICO MAGNATV EX VRBE CALENI DEVASTA RESIDVO… OBIIT ANN. MDCXXIX DIE XXVIII MAII

The solemn use of D.O.M. in a civil context sacralises the memory of the local nobility; the adjective Caleniapplied to Carinola reveals a shrewd attempt to claim the inheritance of ancient Cales — a dynastic move to legitimise the Di Leonardo grip on the whole surrounding casale district.

In the woods once belonging to the Ciocchi di Casciano family lies the Silviana Cave: an artificial cavern carved into the tuff for roughly half a mile, with a spring of pure water. Popular legend ascribed it to Roman emperors or to peoples fleeing Sulla; the more probable truth is far more pragmatic — a landowner named Silvio had it dug to irrigate his fields. In Casale, even the legends speak the language of the land.