Benevento

Situated in the current Italian region of Campania, Benevento has ancient origins. Established by the Homeric hero Diomedes, according to myth, it actually was born on the initiative of the Oscan and Samnite people. Conquered by the Romans, the city was sacked several times and came under various rulers from the end of antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The seat of a powerful duchy in the Lombard era, which remained independent despite Charlemagne and the forces of the Franks, it was then an independent principality, and since the eleventh century, except for a brief period as a Norman city, was under papal control. It became part of the kingdom of Naples in the thirteenth century, Benevento was, however, under papal influence in subsequent centuries. It was for example the future Benedict XIII, Vincenzo Maria Orsini, who sought the reconstruction of the city after the earthquake that struck at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.