Every design for Casoria

Casoria lies on the flat Campanian plain just north-east of Naples, merged so closely with Afragola, Arzano, Casavatore and the other neighbours that the borders are hard to spot. Its name goes back to the Latin casa aurea, the "golden house", and it first appears in documents in the late tenth century.

Walk through it and you sense layers of change. Benedictine monks of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples shaped the early village and brought the cult of San Mauro, still the patron saint. Once its marshes were drained it became one of the most fertile corners of the region, an agricultural town that also made pasta and wine. After the war it turned into the main industrial hub of southern Italy and its population grew fourfold, before most of the factories closed again. The Museo laboratorio della civiltà contadina "Masseria Luce" keeps the farming memory alive, and the Presepe Permanente is one of the places locals point out.

The CAM Casoria Contemporary Art Museum is the surprise in all this: a gallery of modern art in a suburb most people only drive through. Wear Casoria and you wear that surprise, the golden house and the town that kept reinventing itself.