Celle di San Vito

The commune sits in the Subappennino chain on the Campania border, fifty kilometers west of Foggia, in the Monti Dauni. Its name comes from a cenobium founded on the mountain above by Benedictine monks as a summer cell, and the settlement below grew up around it. The village lost its autonomy to the Barony of Val Maggiore in 1440 and did not recover it until the early nineteenth century, with the abolition of feudal rights.

Three kilometers up the ridge sits Faeto, the only other Franco-Provençal-speaking village in the south. The two share a dialect, Faetar-Cigliàje, descended from colonists that Charles I of Anjou settled in the Daunia after 1266, and both are recognised as a linguistic minority under Italian law 482 of 1999. A mountain cell that gave a village its name, a dialect that outlasted the empire that planted it, and a population still shrinking below the smallest count in the region: the isolation that preserved the language is the same isolation now emptying the village of speakers.