The practice of the “Sacred Spring” marked the beginning of the new people, the Samnites. Originally Sabines, around the VII-VI century b.C, they travelled from their land in order to colonise new territories, southern most, along the Apennines.
According to the legend, a torus led them where the Opici were already living, who were speaking the Oscan language like them. They settled there, between Abruzzo, Molise and the north-eastern part of the Campania. From that new land, from where the Samnites took the name of Samnium, they started a progressive expansion towards the coast, with the occupation of Capua and Cuma. This is what, in the second half of the IV century b.C, led them to fight against Rome which was also in expanding phase, during the three Samnite Wars. The fout tribes reunited in the Lega sannitica, although defeated in the end, gave hard time the Romans, inflicting them in 321 b.C the defeat of the Caudine Forks, in the valley close to their capital Caudium.
Subdued by the Romans fifteen years after the colony of Benevento, the Samnites continued their opposition against Rome in the wars against Pyrrhus and the Carthaginians and in the social war.
At the beginning of the empire, with the administrative reorganization decided by Augustus, the Samnium started taking part in the Regio IV Samnium to which it kept being assigned during the subsequent revisions. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, even the Samnium has not been saved from the conflict between the Goths and the Byzantines, concluded with the victory of the latter, whose dominion had a short duration.
In 570 the Lombards descended from the North and they settled in the area where they founded the Duchy of Benevento, able to gain a remarkable autonomy from the northern kingdom with Pavia as a capital. The power of the Lombards of Benevento was strong, and has not been affected by the historic opposition against the Byzantines, to who vast territories had been taken progressively. Therefore, when the North Lombard kingdom has been conquered by Charlemagne in 774, the duke Arechi II changed the duchy to a principality, continuing its consolidation. In the IX century, the principality reached its greatest expansion, controlling most of Southern Italy.
In the first decades of the XI century the decline which opened the doors to the Norman conquest started. Robert Guiscard took possession of Benevento in 1503, declaring the subservience to the Papal State. The cities and their surroundings stayed under its dominion, except an interruption during the Napoleonic era, until 3rd of September 1860 when the city started being part of the new Kingdom of Italy. While the rest of the Samnium, after the Norman domination had been integrated, during Angevin times, to the Kingdom of Naples of which it followed the vicissitudes, and then to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, until the advent of the Kingdom of Italy. When the project to found the Region of Samnium had ended in the first years of the unified State, the province of Benevento was established instead.
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