Every design for Acerra

Few cities in Campania are older than Acerra. The Osci called it Akeru and the Romans Acerrae, and in 332 BC its people were granted Roman citizenship, though without the vote. It stayed loyal to Rome when Hannibal besieged it in 216 BC; the inhabitants fled, the city was plundered and burnt, and they came back to rebuild it once he had been driven out of Campania. Virgil praised the fertility of its land on the river Clanius, and Strabo mentioned it alongside Nola and Nuceria.

The Castello Baronale recalls the long feudal centuries that followed, when Acerra was a Norman county and later a domain of families such as the Aquino, the Orsini del Balzo and the Cardenas. The Museo Archeologico keeps the older story, and the Museo della Maschera di Pulcinella is devoted to the famous mask. The town also keeps the memory of 1 October 1943, when units of the Hermann Göring Division massacred nearly ninety civilians here, one of the bloodiest massacres in Campania.

Today Acerra spreads across the flat Agro Acerrano north-east of Naples, with fields to the north and industrial zones beside them. For anyone from here, coming home is the plain opening out again, and the old castle waiting.