Atena Lucana

In Roman times the valley was called Campus Atinas, after this municipium which counted for more than the other centres of the plain, and both Pliny the Elder and Cicero mention it. Cicero did more than mention it: on a night in April of the year 58 before Christ, while fleeing towards Brindisi, he stopped here in the villa of the Helvii, relatives of his mother Helvia, and there he had a dream foretelling his return home — he tells it in the De Divinatione, writing that nothing could be more divine than the dream of Atina. The town was old already: the megalithic walls are of the fourth century before Christ, and under the Lucanians Atena was one of the twelve city-states of their confederation. After the Social War it became a municipium governed by quattuorviri, and an inscription in the Oscan language but written in Greek characters records the building of a public edifice with the approval of the local senate. Of the great paved forum — a unique thing, says the source, from Pompeii southwards — a portion came back to light in 1880 with an inscription naming two of the four magistrates, Logismus and Marcellus, who had paid for its paving out of public money: the mother church of Santa Maria Maggiore stands on that forum.

The Saracen raids of the ninth and tenth centuries destroyed the Roman city and forced the inhabitants up onto the hill, where they founded the medieval civitas with walls, towers and gates. From 1282 Atena belonged to the Sanseverino, who strengthened its defences: Roberto Sanseverino had a very tall cylindrical tower built on the top of the castle, from which, so it was believed, one could catch sight of the sea. Named by pope Innocent the Eighth captain of the papal troops, the same Roberto had a burning firewheel turned on the top of that tower every time he won a victory, in imitation of the girandola of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome: a private firework to announce battles won far away. The Sanseverino held the town until 1507, when their confiscated estates were put up for auction; then came the earthquake of 1561, which killed about thirty people here, the plague of 1656 and, in 1799, the Jacobin risings. Among the men of the Risorgimento is Giuseppe Maria Pessolani, a major of the Thousand.