Saint Uopo appears in no martyrology: not the Roman one, not Bede's, not Rabanus Maurus's. Yet two parchments of 1145 and 1165, from the territory of ancient Noepoli, already call him hagios, and in 1616 the vicar general gathered in the bishop's palace at Chiaromonte, under oath, the statements of people who claimed to have been healed by him: notables, priests, physicians, ordinary folk. One of those statements is the reason the chapel is still standing. Paulo de Arbio was taken ill while his sons were dressing a running sore on his leg; he lost his speech and the use of his right arm, and the physician Jacovo Canusio said he would be dead by midnight. Able to pray only in his mind, Paulo vowed to rebuild the chapel of Sant'Uopo at his own expense, and on 24 May the work began.
What to see
Only one original document of that rebuilding survives, and it is inside the building: an inscribed stone block, now set into the wall on the right as you enter, carrying the date AD 1616. The chapel has a single nave under a gabled, double-pitched roof, and one oddity: the entrance faces east and the altar stands to the west, the reverse of the usual orientation. The only annexe, on the north side, serves as sacristy and store.
The rest is a history of remakes. After 1616 the chapel became the ius patronatus of the mother church of San Giovanni Battista and took in donations, one of them recorded by the notary Giacomo Satriano in 1685; in 1717 the interior gained a carved wooden altar by Giuseppe Arbia of Chiaromonte and a fine painting, later ruined. Twentieth-century photographs and postcards show the building dressed up as a Gothic church, with two mullioned windows opened in the eastern wall and a separate bell tower: all of it was stripped away later to bring back the earlier look, with the small bell-gable on the façade and its bronze bell.
Visiting
The chapel stands in the Sant'Uopo district, about 5 km from Chiaromonte along state road 104 from Sapri to the Ionian, where the houses line both sides of the carriageway. Left without maintenance for a long time, reduced to a ruin and abandoned, it has since been fully restored, and the open space in front of the door has been laid out for the celebrations; once inside, the first thing to look for is the inscribed block on the right.
Our editors' tip
Come on 22 May, the saint's day: the district fills up for the fair of goods and livestock, which was once important enough to last three days. And try getting the name out of the older residents: the old parish registers always write Opo, a form going back to the Greek Euplos; Uopo is recent.