Sant'Angelo Le Fratte

The walls are the reason to come. Sant'Angelo Le Fratte has spent years painting its own house fronts, and the best of them are not pictures hung on a village so much as arguments with it: a flight of steps that stops being stone and carries on in paint, a vine that climbs from a real pot into a painted trellis, a man with a basket of grapes looking down from a balcony that does not exist. You walk up the stepped lanes checking which things are there.

Underneath the village are the cantine, cellars cut back into the hillside where families kept wine and still do, and for four days in the middle of August they open. The town was badly damaged by the Irpinia earthquake in 1980 and much of what stands now was built after it, which is worth knowing when the surfaces look newer than the plan of the streets. The parish church was the seat of the diocese of Satriano on and off between 1430 and 1818 and served as its cathedral, and it holds two paintings attributed to Giovanni De Gregorio.