Casola di Napoli

Casola stands at the foot of the Monti Lattari, right at the mouth of the Sorrentine peninsula, and those mountains carry the name of what they produced: the goats and cows that grazed there gave excellent milk, and the Latin name of the range was indeed Lactarii. That this was pasture country was already written by Cassiodorus and Procopius, who described it as excellent for keeping sheep and milk cows. The Lattari are the backbone of the Sorrentine peninsula and of the Amalfi coast: they stretch out into the Tyrrhenian after skirting the Agro Nocerino, and to the north they are bounded by the plain of the Sarno. The territory of the comune is almost entirely hilly and is crossed by short watercourses, mostly torrential, that come down from the mountain.

The town is tightly conurbated with Gragnano and borders Lettere, and that corner of the mountains was long a frontier. Lettere, in fact, was a border city of the Republic of Amalfi: the Amalfitans built a castle there to protect their territory from the raids that came from the gulf of Naples, and between 978 and 979 a diocese was created there too, with its Romanesque cathedral beside the castle. Through those hills passed Amalfi's overland trade towards Naples, and these slopes were the stretch where the maritime republic touched the Neapolitan world. The coat of arms of Casola, by contrast, is very recent: it was granted by decree of the President of the Republic on 2 August 2007.