Sorbo Serpico

Sorbo Serpico was born of a plague. The old village stood higher up, on Monte Serpico, on the defensive perimeter of the Roman colony of Avellino, and its name is said to come from a temple of Serapis; it appears as a hamlet already in a document of 901, when it depended on the Lombard centre of Conza. Then came the plague of 1656, which decimated the population: the survivors moved lower down and founded Sorbo. Since then Serpico has emptied in favour of the new village, and today only ruins of the old castle are left among the trees.

Here water has always been the wealth: it turned mills and paper works, and from a saline spring came the salt that Avellino needed; today the comune's springs feed the city's aqueduct. And it was over water that the thing the village remembers best happened: in 1983, three years after the earthquake that struck the Irpinia so hard, it was the women of Sorbo Serpico who organised the protest that stopped the water company from tapping the Saucito spring, which had always been the public fountain and washhouse. They won.