Serrara Fontana

Serrara Fontana has 3,164 inhabitants on the island of Ischia, and it is the only one of the island's six comuni that runs from the sea up to the summit: it starts at the village of Sant'Angelo, the southernmost point of the island, and reaches the top of Monte Epomeo. It is also the highest and the least populous. The names of its villages tell the place by themselves: Calimera comes from the Greek kalè emera, good morning, because it is one of the first points on the island the sun reaches in the morning; Epomeo comes from the Greek verb meaning to see, and stands for "I look around"; Fontana, instead, comes from a spring of drinking water around which the hamlet grew, and which a landslide destroyed a couple of centuries ago.

The other islanders call this comune Merecoppe, that is "the place up high", and its dialect is unlike any other on the island because it has Sicilian words in it: chiddu for that, beddu for beautiful. High up, on the Epomeo, stands the hermitage of San Nicola with its little church, both cut into the green tuff before 1459; but there are buildings cut into the tuff everywhere here, houses and cellars, because that rock keeps a good temperature in summer and in winter. Down by the sea, Sant'Angelo is the only village on Ischia that is entirely pedestrian: only small electric cars go about, to supply the shops. The first hotel there was opened in 1932 by a German woman, Linda Helene Penzel, who turned her husband's family house into one.