Campobasso historical timeline

Campobasso is a modern capital on a very old landscape.

The Samnites

These hills were the heartland of the Samnites, the confederation that fought Rome through three wars in the fourth and third centuries BC and beat a Roman army badly enough at the Caudine Forks to be remembered for it. Rome ground them down and eventually devastated the region under Sulla.

Medieval Campobasso

The town proper appears in the Lombard period and grew around the hill under a succession of feudal families, the Monforte-Gambatesa among them, who rebuilt the castle after the earthquake of 1456.

Knives

From the medieval period the town made blades. Campobasso cutlery was traded across the kingdom of Naples and the trade survived in a reduced form into the twentieth century.

The new city

In 1814 Joachim Murat made Campobasso a provincial capital, and a new town was laid out on the lower ground below the old one on a regular grid — an unusual piece of deliberate planning, and the reason the city has two entirely different characters.

The region

Molise was joined to Abruzzo for over a century and became a region in its own right only in 1963, the youngest in Italy. Campobasso has been its capital since.

Maple Leaf City

Canadian troops took Campobasso in October 1943 after hard fighting along the Biferno, and the First Canadian Division turned the city into a leave centre for the winter, with cinemas, canteens and a newspaper. Soldiers called it Maple Leaf City, and the name is still used here.

Emigration

The region has lost people continuously since the 1880s, to the Americas and then to northern Italy, and it is still losing them.