Abella was a town of the second rank among the small cities of ancient Campania — smaller than neighbouring Nola , but sitting on the road that joined the Campanian plain to the Sabato valley and the Samnite interior, and growing the nux Abellana , the hazelnut that carries its name to this day.

Its relations with Nola are recorded in one of the most important surviving documents in the Oscan language : the Cippus Abellanus , a treaty between the two towns over a sanctuary of Hercules they held in common. In the Social War Abella stayed loyal to Rome, and in 87 BC the Samnites still holding Nola destroyed it for that. Sulla afterwards planted a colony here, and the division of the farmland was laid out as a continuation of Nola's.

The Roman town is unusually visible still: the amphitheatre , a monumental necropolis of tomb-towers, and in the façade of the church of San Pietro the imago clipeata of Lucio Sitrio Modesto . One citizen is known by name from a distant war — the centurion Numerio Marcio Platorio Celere , of the Legio XVI Flavia Firma, decorated on Trajan's Armenian and Parthian campaigns.

In the late empire the town dissolved as the invasions came through and Alaric destroyed Nola. What followed was medieval and firmly attached to the Nolano — and to Terra di Lavoro , not to Irpinia.