Massa di Somma

With the Napoleonic reform Massa, Pollena and Trocchia were put into a single municipality, and here they still say: Massa, Pollena and Trocchia, three villages and one parish. The name of the place appears for the first time on the twenty-ninth of August 965, as locus Massa. After the eruption of Vesuvius in 1872, however, the municipality did something unusual: in 1877 the mayor obtained permission to change its name to Cercola, taking that of the hamlet down in the valley. Massa di Somma thus became a hamlet of itself.

In 1944 the eruption of Vesuvius reached part of the old centre, which is why the village today looks patchy, with old pieces and rebuilt ones. The bell tower of the old church of Santa Maria Assunta, which escaped the lava, has become the symbol of the place. The municipality of its own came back only in 1988.