Sant'Anastasia

On Easter Monday thousands of barefoot fujenti run towards the sanctuary of the Madonna dell'Arco: it is one of the most intense pilgrimages in the South, born of the fifteenth-century prodigy of the image that was struck and bled, and that is venerated here. The sanctuary is the second in Campania, grown around that votive shrine which still stands beneath the high altar, and its walls are covered with the little painted panels left by those who received a grace: there is a whole museum of them.

The name, on the other hand, was left by soldiers. In 552 the Byzantine army of Narses defeated on this plain the Goths of king Teia, who died there, and the victorious Greeks, instead of going home, settled here and mixed with the local people: to a wide stretch of land they gave the name of a Greek virgin saint, Anastasia, venerated all over the East. An even older piece of naming survives in a hamlet called Romani and in a very common surname: here the Senate of Rome, to settle a boundary quarrel between Nola and Naples, had reserved a strip of land for itself, the Campus Romanus. For centuries afterwards the copyists mangled Sant'Anastasia into Santo Nastaso. The town lies on the slopes of Monte Somma, the ancient crater of Vesuvius, inside the national park: chestnut woods, catalanesca vines, pellecchiella apricots and, on the table, even aubergines with chocolate. Naples is a quarter of an hour away.