San Sebastiano al Vesuvio

On 22 August 1753 Gaetano Filangieri was born here, in an old villa of his father's that today falls within the territory of Cercola but at that time stood in San Sebastiano's. He became one of the greatest jurists of the Italian Enlightenment: his Scienza della legislazione served as an inspiration to the makers of the American revolution and, though he never set foot in America, his ideas crossed the ocean thanks to the rich correspondence he kept with Benjamin Franklin between 1781 and 1788, reaching as far as the Constitution of the United States. He died at Vico Equense in 1788, at thirty-five. In 2023, for the two hundred and seventieth anniversary of his birth, the comune named after him the old town hall building, the one in front of the sanctuary, which between 1995 and the end of 2008 had also housed the offices of the Vesuvius National Park.

In the comune's coat of arms, granted in 1998, there is a phoenix, and it is not a merely decorative figure. The village formed around the church built by the monks of the monastery of San Sebastiano, on the slopes of the Somma-Vesuvius complex, and it has often been a victim of the volcano: ruinous were the eruptions of 1855 and 1872, but above all that of March 1944, which destroyed about forty per cent of the built-up area. The rebuilding of the following years is the reason why the bird that is reborn stands in the shield. Over the centre rises the imposing majolica dome of the ancient mother church, designed in the seventeenth century: it is the only church of the archdiocese of Naples dedicated to Saint Sebastian martyr, and it was raised to a diocesan sanctuary on 21 January 2007 by cardinal Crescenzio Sepe. In 1953, finally, the frazione of Volla was detached from the comunal territory and became an autonomous comune.