Acerno

The name is a tree. Girolamo Olivieri, bishop of Acerno between 1525 and 1539, wrote to Rome that the town is called this from the multitude of maples, and the woods still bear him out: maple, chestnut, beech, hornbeam and hazel all over the mountain. The oldest document that names it is kept in the archive of the abbey of Cava de' Tirreni and dates from 1027: it speaks of orchards in a place called Acerno. Tradition traces the town back to refugees from Picentia, the city destroyed by the Romans after the Second Punic War.

Outside the built-up area nobody lives at all: no hamlets, no scattered houses, only woodland and pasture up into the Picentini, with golden eagles, wild cats, otters and wolves. And yet a great deal of work was done here: the old paper mills and ironworks on the Tusciano are still there, and a lignite mine. A fief of Roger of Lauria and later a marquisate of the Mascara family until the eighteenth century, Acerno was broken by the earthquake of 23 November 1980: that evening Radio Acerno International, on the air since 1978, went off for good as well, because the building that housed it was gone.