Taurasi

Taurasi sits at four hundred meters on a hill in the Media Valle del Calore, in the Irpinia of the Avellino province, forty kilometers inland from Salerno. The castle above the town was built in the seventh century by the Lombards, destroyed by Saracen raids between 900 and 910, rebuilt and extended by the Normans in the twelfth century with a square keep, and partly destroyed again by Alfonso d'Aragona's troops in 1461. The Gesualdo, Filangieri, Ludovisi and Carafa families took it in turn through the early modern period, each leaving their mark on a structure that was never allowed to settle into a single style.

The upper ridge holds the castle and its history of damage and repair. The lower town holds the parish church and its patronal feast, the daily religious life set apart from the fortress above. Between them, the medieval center keeps three gates and the noble palaces that once answered to whichever family held the keep.

Around all of it, the vineyards run down the slopes, the same ground that has outlasted every family that held the castle above it. What the place adds up to is a hill town where the fortress changed hands over and over while the vines below kept producing, so the wine, not the castle, became the more durable claim to distinction.