entry Sept
2013
Ancient Cales & the Demanio di Calvi
Calvi is
another name for Cales, the ancient city taken by
the Romans in the 4th century BC in their very early
stages of empire building; that is, they were just sort of
moving the city limits out a bit. The Roman remains of
Cales may still be seen today near Sparanise, 40 k/25
miles north of Naples (photo, right, by P. Mesolella). The modern town on the
ancient site is named Calvi risorta (Calvi
reborn!). Before the Romans, Cales had been the center of
an earlier Italic population
called the Ausones (or Ausoni in modern Italian),
a people that inhabited areas of southern Italy well
beyond Campania by about 1000 BC. That people may have
come from Greece, but there is also archaeological
evidence of Etruscan origin or at least influence. The
source of the name Cales may be the proper
name Calai, mythologically said to be one of
Jason’s companions aboard the Argo and to have
founded Cales, this first Ausonian center of population in
Campania. (There are also other places in southern Italy
that claim connection to the Argonauts. For more, see
entries on The Heraion near Paestum,
Sirens, and Hilltowns of Cilento.) (There
are other etymological possibilities for Cales. They range
from the mundane and plausible Greek, kale=beautiful,
to the very far-fetched, after the city of Callah,
mentioned in Genesis 10:11! Pick one. Or make up your
own.) As far as the letter V goes in the modern name,
there are some Latin spellings of Cales as Calus—but,
of course, the Romans used V, not U; thus, you wind up in
the Middle Ages with some fancy orthographic hocus-pocus
giving us Calvi. In any event, by the time the Bourbons
got around to building one of their royal residences and
hunting grounds here, the area around the old ruined city
had been called the Domain of Calvi for a very, very
long time.
As recently as
World War II the Bourbon buildings in the Demanio
di Calvi were in relatively solid condition; these
included the main residence and the chapel. Then the
retreating Germans shelled it in 1943 and the rest is all
downhill. It was a barracks, a stable and then even an
elementary school until about 30 years ago. Part of the
premises were then demolished to make room for a road, and
other parts became a rubbish dump.The whole thing was
generally subjected to all the ignominies of chaotic
post-war overbuilding in the Campanian plain behind
Naples. By 2002 the site had apparently been taken over by
a squatter farmer who made his own "deprovements." (Is
that a word? I hope so.) The former Bourbon premises were
in worse condition than the remains of ancient Cales. Some
funds, however, were allocated in 2008 for the restoration
of whatever remained: laws were drafted, speeches given,
banners draped, committees formed, and a book was written
about the site (il Demanio di Calvi, il Casino, la
Cappella e altre amenità calene by P. Mesolella,
Spring publishers, Caserta, 2008. Book cover, right. The
word calene in the title is the adjective for Cales
in modern Italian.) There seemed to be some enthusiasm for
restoring what was once an impressive part of the Bourbon
architectural/cultural heritage of the kingdom of Naples.An inventory from 1910 of this historic relic speaks of a piece of property some four square km in area; it included a Western Tower, a 12-room Casino Reale, a chapel and other out buildings. There were woods, stables, parks and room for the hunt. It was, indeed, one of Ferdinand IV’s favorite haunts and the place where he spent some years of his life writing letters to Luisa Migliaccio Partanna, the woman would then become his “morganatic” * wife after the death of his first wife, queen Caroline.
*(morganatic: from matrimonium morganaticum, literally "marriage with a morning gift," referring to a gift given to the wife on the day of marriage, in lieu of any share in the husband's property. The term designated a form of marriage in which a nobleman, in this case, king Ferdinand, married a woman of lower social status with the provision that, although children would be legitimate, neither they nor the wife might lay claim to the husband's rank or property. In other words, she became his wife but not his queen.)
Complete list of the 22 Royal Bourbon sites
A lot of things can happen to buildings and land from 1789. In this case, the list is endless, but the site survived flooding and even the turmoil of Italian unification and, as noted, the property was intact in 1910 and even later during at least part of WWII. (Unfortunately, the Demanio di Calvi lay along the main invasion route of the Allied armies in late 1943 as they pursued the retreating Germans up towards Mt. Cassino and Rome.) But the main problem is simply the disastrous overbuilding in the Campanian plain since the 1950s. Old pieces of property were simply taken over illegally, old buildings were torn down and if they were not torn down, they were stripped bare of anything that could be salvaged. I am not aware that the enthusiasm from 2008 to restore whatever can be saved in the Demanio di Calvi has generated any tangible results.
Many thanks to Serene Salvi for steering me to Calvi antica e moderna ossia memorie istoriche dell'antichissima città di Calvi by Mattia Zona, 2nd edition, pub. Raffaele Miranda, Naples. 1820.
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