History
The city's origins are very ancient having been settled since the Neolithic (circa 7000 BC) and continued to be inhabited until around 900 BC. Successively a tribe of the brave Samnites, the Hirpini, the warriors of the wolf, founded Aequum Tuticum; a site which within years became Roman while benefitting from its fortuitous location at the crossing of two major routes, the Via Traiana road and the Via Herculeia.
The decline of Aequum Tuticum began with the first barbaric invasions. As a result of this, the three hills started to be inhabited, a high and easily defendable place, and it is here that Ariano was born, a fortified city in a strategic position; today its ancient and formidable defensive walls are still recognizable and are part of the city. In a secure place away from the invasions of the Goths and Byzantines, Ariano is a fortified city of the Lombards. Around 1000 the Castle was built to defend the city against the Byzantines which, although ruined, still proudly stands in the Villa Comunale city park.
Successively conquered by the Normans, in 1140 it was the place where were promulgated, by Roger II of Sicily, the Assizes of Ariano, the then-new constitution of the Kingdom of Sicily. This legal corpus will be adopted almost integrally and with a few variations into the Constitutions of Melfi of the Emperor Frederick II. In the same year it is coined the ducat, a coin that will last for seven centuries, until 1860.
In 1255, Manfred of Hohenstaufen, son of Frederick, besieged the city, which resisted strongly thanks to its walls and the combative nature of the inhabitants. During the siege, a group of soldiers from Lucera pretended to be disserters of Manfred's army, and were welcomed into the city. During the night, they revealed their double face, sacking and destroying the city with the fire and killing all the inhabitants. There's still a road in memory of that tragic event, called La Carnale (The Carnage).
More than ten years later, in 1266, Charles I of Anjou rebuilt the city and gave it two thorns of the crown of Christ, still conserved in a reliquary into the city's Romanesque cathedral. All these happenings are reproduced every year in the Rievocazione Storica del Dono delle Sante Spine (Historical Reinvocation of the Gift of the Sacred Thorns) and in the reproduction of the Incendio del Campanile (Belltower Burning), a pyrotechnic event that lights the main square of the city and the side of the cathedral.
After the Capetian House of Anjou lost control of Sicily to Peter III of Aragon in the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the city passed to the Provenzale dei Desambramo family from 1294 to 1413; and then in the hands of the Carafa family and the House of Gonzaga. Still today are there in the city buildings that were of the Spanish families which governed at that time. On 2 August 1545 the city rebelled against the feudal regime and became a Città Regia (city-state) dependent on the Viceroy of the Kingdom of Sicily.
Read more about this topic: Ariano Irpino
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