Taurano

In the convent of San Giovanni del Palco, founded by the Franciscans in 1396 on the ruins of a Roman villa, there is a wooden altar that was not born here: it came from the convent of Santa Croce di Palazzo in Naples, which the Bourbons suppressed and demolished to clear the space of today's piazza del Plebiscito. That church no longer exists, its altar does, and it ended up in a hill village of the Lauro valley. The convent also keeps works by Sebastiano Conca, fifteenth-century frescoes and a library with sixteenth-century books and antiphonaries; brother Ludovico da Casoria was formed there. Beneath and beside it, the Roman villa is still readable: a building on three levels of more than thirteen hundred square metres, with the frigidarium, the laconicum and the calidarium well preserved and a nymphaeum of the age of Tiberius decorated in mosaic with tesserae of glass paste and limestone.

Higher up, on a spur of bare rock sheer above the built-up area of Lauro, stands the Benedictine abbey of Sant'Angelo, of 1087, whose grey tuff portal is adorned with masks and rosettes — some of which have been carried off by persons unknown. Taurano was a Samnite oppidum, destroyed by Sulla during the Social War, and its name probably comes from a Roman, a Taurius or a Taurus; on the coat of arms, granted in 1984, there is nonetheless a black bull on a golden field. In the nineteenth century the village gave shelter both to anti-Bourbon conspirators, such as friar Angelo Peluso, and to brigands, Fra Diavolo included. Today two thirds of the non-built-up land is hazelnut grove: about a thousand tonnes of hazelnuts are produced each year.