Piano di Sorrento

It took five centuries to break away from Sorrento. In 1218 the grand justiciar Enrico de Morra was charged by Frederick II with hearing the complaints of the representatives of the Piano; in 1308 came the first formal request for separation, and the answer was no. In 1491 the Capitoli of king Ferrante of Aragon granted the Piano a mayor and four elected men inside the Universitas of Sorrento, and in 1542, under viceroy Pedro de Toledo, the elected became five and, above all, twenty-four councillors arrived with the right to meet on their own, as the Universitas del Piano, in the church of San Michele. In 1648, on the wave of Masaniello's Neapolitan revolt, the Genoese adventurer Giovanni Grillo roused the people of Piano and Massa and besieged Sorrento from late January to early April, without taking it: the Spanish drowned the whole thing in blood. Autonomy came only on 8 January 1808, with a decree of Joseph Bonaparte.

Then it was the Piano's turn to be left: Meta separated in 1819 and Sant'Agnello in 1865, and under fascism Sorrento took them all back, until in 1946 the boundaries returned to what they had been. The inhabitants call the place by two names, Carotto and Cassano, and the explanation usually given points to an ancient earthquake that broke one part — cà rotto — and left the other sound — cà sano; Cassano is the name of the marina, a fishing village at the bottom of steep hairpins under the cliff. That cliff is of Sorrento tufo, born from the material that an enormous eruption of the ancestor of the Phlegraean volcanoes laid down over the limestone rocks: light and porous, good to build with, so much so that at Piano every house older than the twentieth century is of tufo.