Every design for Campobasso

In the Second World War Campobasso was taken by Canadian troops after heavy fighting with the Germans, and their presence left such a mark that the town became known as Canada Town, or Maple Leaf City. It was one more layer on an old story. The town began as a Lombard fortified camp on the slope of the hill where the castle now stands, turned into a trading and administrative centre after the Normans came, and for more than four centuries was ruled by the Monforte-Gambatesa family, who built the castle and set up a mint.

Campobasso stands at over seven hundred metres in the high basin of the Biferno, ringed by the Sannio and Matese mountains, and the Castello Monforte sits higher still. In the eighteenth century the inhabitants left the old town on the slope for a new one on the lower plain, and in the nineteenth Joachim Murat expanded it. So the city has two faces: winding lanes and stairways fanning out around the hill above, and the orderly nineteenth-century streets on the low field below, the Campo Basso, the low field.

Anyone who grew up here can trace the climb from the gardens of the lower town, past San Leonardo, up the stairways to the Castello Monforte. On the map it is all there: two Campobassos, one above the other.