San Giuseppe Vesuviano

San Giuseppe Vesuviano was born of a crossroads and an eruption. At the end of the sixteenth century some people from Ottaviano came down into the valley, where the road to Sarno crossed the one that came from Irpinia to the ports of Torre Annunziata and Castellammare, and they understood that with all that cart traffic it paid to open taverns and inns: the place was known as alli Boccia, from the name of the family that owned the estate. Then, in 1631, Vesuvius devastated Ottaviano and people fled down here, further from the crater; once the parish church was built, the district took the saint's name. It became a municipality in its own right only at the end of the nineteenth century, by a decree of Umberto I, and a year later a second decree added the Vesuviano.

The volcano presented its bill again in 1906: the town was almost destroyed, and in the chapel of the Holy Spirit, where two hundred people had gathered to pray, the roof gave way under the weight of the ash and a hundred and five of them died. The town got back on its feet, and in 1923 it put on its coat of arms the motto it had earned: Ex flammis orior, I rise again from the flames. From the nineteen-sixties trade turned into industry, and for thirty years San Giuseppe was, with Prato, the most important textile district in Italy; the work has more recently brought a large immigration from China and Bangladesh. The sanctuary of San Giuseppe, which grew all through the twentieth century with its high dome and monumental front, still dominates the centre.