Rocca di Neto

For thirty years this town bore the name of a king. The earthquake of 1832 destroyed it, and the rebuilding was done a little higher up than the old village: the new centre took the name Rocca Ferdinandea, in honour of Ferdinand II of Bourbon, and kept it until 1863, when after the unification of Italy it was thought better to call it after the river that runs along its southern edge. Before that it was called Casale di Terrate and, from 71 BC, it depended on Petelia, the city that is Strongoli today.

Its history is made of monks and masters. In 1178 the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria delle Terrate was founded here, and it was those monks who drew the farming landscape of the hamlet, planting vineyards, fruit trees and kitchen gardens around the houses. In 1664 the fief was bought by the charterhouse of Santo Stefano del Bosco, the one founded by Saint Bruno of Cologne, which sold property on its other estates to pay for it: so the baronial chamber ended up in the hands of a religious body, and stayed there until 1783, when the suppression of the Carthusians passed it to the state. In 1662 the church of the Madonna delle Sette Porte had been built, over the cell of a hermit where a fifteenth-century painting of the Virgin had been found.