Mirabello Sannitico today lies only 10 miles northeast of the site, suggesting that any early inhabitants belonged to the powerful tribe.

The scattered populace of the Samnites are a product of ver sacrum, a Sabine tradition that forced tribal members into colonization of unsettled land.

Any early occupants could have been those Livy mentioned in "the adjoining country" during the first raids that were "laid to waste", the "forts and smaller towns [that] were either destroyed or surrendered" in the Samnite counterattack, or the "enemy... driven from the fields" that were "sold into slavery" in Quintus Fabuis's final assault.

[6] De Sanctis writes that it was the Romans themselves who called the site "Mirum Bellum", combined with Sanniti (Italian for Samnites) from which the current toponym Mirabello Sannitico is derived.

The neighboring municipalities of Isernia and Sepino were colonized by the Bulgars (also called "Vulgars"), as recorded by the Lombard Paolo Diacono in his Historia Langobardorum writing in c.

[7] The steward (a less important title than Duke) Alcek was tied to Molise and Paolo Diacono, which may suggest Bulgarian presence in the area as early as the 670s.

[11] In 1053, Rodolfo di Moulins led the attack on nearby Bojano, then-capital of the Duchy of Benevento, establishing Norman rule over the region.

On July 26, 1805 an earthquake struck the area that killed nearly 6,000 people in Molise and 300 in Mirabello and turned a previously damaged church, San Nicola, to rubble.

The town is laid out in a classic medieval fashion, with a radial array of streets surrounding the principal church, Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo.

The earliest known reference to the church is in an ecclesiastical inventory of Bojano diocese of August 20, 1241, executed by the notary, Guglielmo, under Giovanni Capuano of Naples, on order from Emperor Fredrick II of Svevia.

The relics of this history remains with a statuary of Saint Nicholas in the wall at the end of via Roma and vici named San Nicola II and III.

At the end of via Roma lies an ancient well, where the cap stones have numerous deeply carved vertical grooves due to centuries of hauling water with buckets and ropes.