Before Rome this was woodland, thinly settled by farmers dependent on nearby Caudium . The town begins with the Lombards : a castrum belonging to the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno until it was ceded to Duke Sicardo of Benevento in 837 , as the Chronicon Vulturnense records — and it is there that the name first appears, castrum quod dicitur Cerbinaria in Caudetanis .

When Benevento and Salerno split in 849 , the fortress on the height above the valley became a strategic point for the defence of the capital. Under the Normans, late in the eleventh century, it grew into a walled borgo with a rectangular keep. Between 1128 and 1139 it was sacked by Roger II in his war against his brother-in-law Rainulfo. The Della Leonessa , the Carafa and the Caracciolo held it in turn.

The decisive change came in the sixteenth century , and it was not military. Farming and trade improved, the population grew to some two and a half thousand, and the people came down off the hill to settle in casali on the valley floor. The old nucleus emptied. The Palazzo Marchesale went up at Ferrari in the same period. Growth checked in the seventeenth century and resumed in the eighteenth, and the outlying hamlets — not the fortress — became the town.