Quindici

In Roman times there were fifteen farms in this hollow, family holdings, and the Romans took to calling the place ad quindecim praedia, at the fifteen estates. The phrase was shortened to Quindecim, then in the curial jargon of the fifteen hundreds turned into a noun, Quindecium, and at last Italianised: Quindici, fifteen. The other explanations have been knocked down one by one — that it was the fifteenth casale of the Vallo di Lauro (the settlements are sixteen now and were once many more), that it was the fifteenth military station going south (the consular roads passed nowhere near), and that the name came from fifteen brigands from Amalfi, which a local historian dismisses as a rumour invented almost to justify the village feuds. The old coat of arms wrote the number outright: a cornucopia for the fertility of this ground, with the Roman numerals X and V beside it, and the slopes of two mountains making the valley.

Quindici stands at the foot of the Pizzo d'Alvano, in a green hollow known since antiquity for the fertility of its soil and for its many springs. On 5 May 1998 the mountain came down: rapid mudflows struck this comune together with Sarno, Bracigliano and Siano, took half the territory of Quindici and destroyed many houses; at Sarno alone a hundred and thirty-seven people died. The village had had its best time in the Renaissance, when twenty churches were built here; it was a fief of the Orsini, the Sanseverino, the Pignatelli and the Lancellotti, and before the unification of Italy it belonged not to this province but to the Terra di Lavoro.