Santa Maria la Carità

The bell tower of the church is a watchtower with a road that once ran beneath it. Around 950 the Lombards began to build military towers on this plain to defend themselves from the Saracens, who from Gragnano had tried in vain to reach Amalfi; centuries later, one of those towers became the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria la Carità. Tradition says that the old road linking the Sarno to the Monti Lattari passed precisely under the tower, continuing along what is now via Pioppelle, and the large openings at the base of the bell tower, which are still there, would have had exactly that purpose. In 1318 king Robert of Anjou, marking out the fief of Cancelleria, set this very church as the boundary. As a comune, on the other hand, the place is very young: the first bills date from 1950, but autonomy from Gragnano came only in 1978.

In the church of the Madonna delle Grazie there was a painting by Sandro Botticelli. Its presence is documented from the end of the fifteenth century, when the painter, prompted by pope Sixtus IV, decided to give a Madonna and Child to this territory in order to get into the good graces of the Medici, who owned land here. In the nineteen-sixties the picture was moved during restoration work on the church, and from that moment every trace of it was lost. It reappeared in December 2023, found in critical condition and at once put through an urgent restoration. The church that held it, meanwhile, is in a bad way itself. Around it the land still gives tomatoes, fruit, olives and flowers, and in the fields Roman villas of the first century before Christ have been found, some of which still keep their cella vinaria, frumentaria, olearia and fructuaria.