Pollena Trocchia

The comune's two names come one from a god and one from a tool. Pollena stands for the cult of Apollo, to whom an important temple was dedicated in pre-Roman and Roman times: when Christianity arrived the first church of Apolline was dedicated to Sant'Apollinario, keeping a kind of continuity at least in the name. Trocchia, on the other hand, comes from the Latin trochlea, the press, because the village was famous for its grapes — the Lacryma of Vesuvius — and the press is the tool with which wine is made; according to others it would derive from Introchia, and the dialect has kept the expression «figlio 'e 'Ntrocchia» for a sharp and enterprising person. In the eruption of 1631 rivers of boiling mud came down from the mountain and buried Trocchia, which has ever since been the lesser of the two centres; on 4 May 1811 Murat's reform joined them into a single comune, with the double name.

United on paper, however, they have remained separate in their churches and their saints. A plausible explanation goes back to that same 1631: with the parishes of Trocchia, Pollena and Massa di Somma damaged, the diocese of Naples entrusted the faithful of the three communities to the parish of San Sebastiano, which had come through the eruption undamaged. At Trocchia Gaetano Donizetti liked to stay, and a plaque recalls it: in the shade of an old olive tree — since then called the Olive of Donizetti — in 1835 he wrote the first notes of Lucia di Lammermoor.