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Hill
Towns of Cilento 
The light-green area
is the province of Salerno;
There are many reasons why people choose to live on a hilltop, and almost all of them have to do with being safe; hilltops are easier to defend. Certainly, if you are an entire colony of settlers trying to flee the cramped Aegean for the wide-open spaces in the west (meaning Italy!) a few thousand years ago, and you come with enough ships and people (especially warriors with those newfangled Iron-Age swords) and lots of time and the will to tough it out because this is your new home, then you will dare to set up shop on an open plain near a water source. If there were others there before you, they were primitive tribes who scurried away to the hilltops, mumbling, “There goes the neighborhood.” Thus, the Greeks built Paestum on a plain in 600 BC and the natives scurried. It wasn’t exactly uncharted territory. The Greeks’ own myths told them that both Jason and Ulysses had sailed these waters and, in concrete terms, they were really only about a day’s sail south of the next bay to the north; though Neapolis (Naples) did not yet exist, the Greek trading post on the island of Pithecusa (Ischia) did, and it was doing boom-town business with the Etruscans. Payback
came
in about 400 BC when the natives moved back in with
the help of their indigenous cousins, the Samnites, perhaps the most
belligerent people ever to inhabit the peninsula—and
the only ones the Romans were afraid of. “Scurrying
away” again became the thing to do, but this time it
was the Greeks doing it. They moved off the plain and
started the long tradition of sprinkling the local
hills with the small towns that now make up the area.
The hill towns were later pretty much left alone by
the Romans, who set up some forts in the hills but
generally by-passed much of the area with main
north-south roads along the coastal plains and through
the valleys. After the Romans the barbarian
invasions came and then the ensuing Gothic Wars that had
everyone moving away from the coast and into the
hills. Then came the infamous “Saracen”
pirate raids in the late part of the millennium.
More scurrying. Trentinara
Though
the
towns
do share a common culture and general physical
appearance, they have developed unique qualities
that distinguish one from the other and make them
stand out individually to those passing through. The
names themselves are striking: Bellosguardo
[Beautiful View], Roccagloriosa
[Glory Rock], Buonabitacolo
[Nice Place to Live], Valle dell’Angelo [Angel Valley], Roccadàspide
[Rock of the Asp!]—and though they all have much in
common, historically, some of them make unique claims:
that last one, Roccadàspide,
claims to have been founded not by any common
refugees, mind you, but by lucky remnants of the army
of Spartacus, the rebel slave who went down to final
defeat at nearby Giungano
in 71 BC against the Roman legions of Marcus Liccinius
Crassus. Or Atena
Lucana [Lucanian Athens!] (Lucania is the
ancient native pre-Greek name for the area), which claims to be
the oldest settlement in the Cilento, with Greek ruins
and Oscan inscriptions to prove it! (Oscan was related
to Latin, and the inscriptions are in the alphabet
learned from the Greeks.) There are old ruined
windmills in Montecorice (and even new wind turbines
in Albanella), remants of the
original stone dwellings built 1500 years ago in Stio,
miraculous well waters in Laureana Cilento (which
legend traces to a visit by St. Paul, himself), the
tiny hermit dwellings of Caselle in Pittari, a Poor
Toy Museum (containing toys
handmade by farmers for their children) in Montana Antilia, and
boat races on the Calore river
below the town of Castel San Lorenzo. Castel San Lorenzo is also where they host the Summer Campus of the Italian Evironmental Protection League; the spaces of the Cilento are home to 2,000 indigenous species of plant life, the royal eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) and even Canis lupus—the wolf. In addition to the Sele river on the northern boundary of the park, there are a number of other important rivers in the area, such as the Alento, the Tamagro, the Bussento, and the Calore. As a special nature bonus to die-hard troglodytes, there are some significant grottos around the Alburni Mounts in the northeast, primarily the Grottos of Castelcivita (named for the nearby town) and the Grottos of the Angel near Pertosa. Both sites show signs of prehistoric habitation. The former has about 5 km of caves, a third of which are open to the public. The latter has small navigable underground lakes filled by the Negro river and is now also the site of theatrical presentations of scenes from Dante's Inferno. (I know, the real entrance to the Inferno is farther north at Lake Averno near Naples, but this place is much spookier!) The
towns
all
have medieval churches, some with old monastery
libraries (the Eleusa Museum in San Mauro Cilento)
and remarkable and seldom visited works of art (the
wooden sculptures in the Church of S. Maria della
Pietà in Bellosguardo); as well,
Padula has the UNESCO World Heritage-rated Certosa (Certosine monastery),
the second largest in Italy. The towns, of course,
have legends, some religious—Paul passed by over
here and Peter over there. Some legends are about
local maidens and daring bandits—Isabella, the
count's daugher and Saul, the brigand, who threw
themselves to their Liebestod from the height of
Trentinara before they would renouce each other.
Some are
mythological—in Caggiano they say
that the earth tremors in the local Alburni Mounts
are caused by the stirring of the Titans, still
hiding underground
after fleeing from the wrath of Neptune ages ago;
and below the hill town of Centola along the coast
is the port of
Palinuro, named in Roman mythology for the helmsman
and companion of Aeneas, the Trojan hero; the
god Somnus caused Palinurus to fall asleep, fall
overboard and drown so that the prophecy might be
fulfilled that Aeneas would not set foot ashore
until a member of his crew died. Ironically, that
state road 18 has been built out into a limited access
superstrada
that shoots through much of the national park, letting
you miss many of the towns. That is, if you follow
only that road from Paestum through the park, you'll
go very fast and come out at the other end at the Gulf
of Policastro in about an hour. That’s a
mistake. Get off that main road 18 at Paestum onto
road 166 and run inland for about a mile, then turn
right and up on province road 13 to Capaccio, the
first hill town and follow the road all the way across
to Vallo di Lucania and beyond, down to the Gulf of
Policastro. You'll pass through over a dozen small
towns on the way, and it will take some hours to get
across. You can also spider off onto secondary roads.
That will take forever and you'll probably get lost,
but it's worth it because all the towns have
some sort of sagra, a festival dedicated
to local saints, music, and, especially,
gastronomy—bread festivals, wine festivals,
chestnut festivals, and cane and cheese and
sausage and you-name-it festivals.
There is no doubt
one with your name on it. And who knows? You may pass
by neo-bucolic mixtures of the sublime and the
ridiculous as I did when I passed a young fellow, a
goatherd, and his faithful mutt tending their animals,
yea & verily, as in days of yore, except that he
(the goatherd, not the dog) was texting on his
cell-phone! For all I know, he was arranging a
"flash mob" to surprise Goliath. note 1: The dating of such a sculpture is difficult and tentative. Most who have written about this site say "from the middle to recent Bronze Age." Within the so-called Three-Age system adopted by European archaeologists in the 19th century, it is important to understand that Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age are broad labels used to indicate states of technology. They are helpful in setting dates, but only in a very general fashion. They do not calibrate across cultures on a world-wide basis, and even within Europe there are often centuries of "wiggle room" in trying to date an artifact such as this rock sculpture. Dating is not done by examination of the rock, but usually by trying to compare the item to something similar of known origin in the area or by examination of other artifacts (usually ceramics) found in the area. Since the Antecce is unique in Campania (which may mean simply that we haven't yet found the others), comparison is not possible; thus, we look at the ceramic finds and combine that with what we know of the pre-Greek history of the area—that it was for many, many centuries a target for pastoral migrations from the interior by peoples who left traces—and come up with "middle to recent Bronze Age," meaning before the year 1000 BC and probably not older than 1500 BC. That is, however, only IF the sculpture was put there by some ancient Italic Bronze Age tribe. As noted in the text, that may not be the case and the sculpture may be more recent. note 2: The Sanseverino revolt is one of the episodes in the history of the kingdom of Naples referred to as a "Barons' Revolt." The two most prominent are this one and the revolt against Frederick II in the 1200s. |
Some
statistics of interest: There are 80 towns in the
Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park, itself, and
15 others in the immediate adjacent areas. (Some of
the better known coastal towns in the adjacent area
are 
There
are also "pre-hill town" surprises, signs of the
indigenous cultures that peopled the area long
before the Greeks arrived. One is the