This village was born from Palma and then turned its back on it. In 1613, by a deed drawn up at the episcopal curia of Nola, Scipione Pignatelli, count of San Valentino and marquis of Lauro, made a rich donation to the bishop of Nola in favour of the Friars Minor of Saint Francis: among other things a piece of land in the then territory of Palma Nolana, today Palma Campania, on which to build a convent with a small community attached. The marquis also founded the fair that is still held every year. The settlement that grew around the Cavallerizza and the convent became first a quarter of Palma, then, from 1841, an autonomous comune by decree of Ferdinand II of Bourbon. And it is from the dispute with the mother town that an Italian word is said to have been born: the clock tower raised in the main square, they tell, was deliberately left without a face on the side turned towards Palma Campania, so that the rivals could not read the time. From bell towers like this one would come campanilismo, parish-pump rivalry.
On 9 September 1943 the Allies landed at Salerno, and in the early hours of 28 September, after days of battle, the first troops arrived here: they were the English, coming from Sarno. A group of local men organised themselves and went to meet the column to show the soldiers where the Germans had laid mines before retreating towards Caserta. They were the men of the forty-sixth «Oak Tree» division, of the British tenth army corps, commanded by general Hawkesworth; they requisitioned two rooms of the palace of the then podestà, in piazza Regina Margherita, and installed their command there, while in the Pagliarone wood an Anglo-American airfield was made. Under all this there is far older ground: the excavations date the first settlements to the full Bronze Age, around two thousand years before Christ, when a sudden eruption of Vesuvius devastated the communities of the plain; and there remain the traces of the Augustan aqueduct and of the via Popilia, with the burial ground of Neronius Rufus, whose stone is kept in the town hall.
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📅 Every year, on 19 September
On 19 September San Gennaro Vesuviano celebrates the patron the municipality is named after; the same day also halts the oldest fair in southern Italy, founded in the 17th century by Marquis Scipione Pignatelli, for the Mass held in the saint's memory.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Gennaro Vesuviano, but an easy day trip away.
