Auletta

A legend reported by abbot Pacichelli has Auletta founded by Auleto, a companion of Aeneas; the notaries, less poetic, call it olibola in 1095 and olivola in 1131, from olea, the olive tree that covers these hills. By the year one thousand the village was already walled, with three gates, and the castle formed part of the defensive system of the duchy of Salerno. Its present layout came from an inspection: after 1494 the fortifications expert Antonio Marchesi had it rebuilt, and so rebuilt it held in 1535 against the assaults of Charles the Fifth's Spanish troops. It later passed to the Castriota Scanderbech, descendants of the Albanian hero, whose heirs own it still.

The history of Auletta, though, is above all one of hunger and fire. At the end of the seventeenth century the village counted six hundred inhabitants, eight priests and fifteen clerics. The harvest of 1763 gave back less than had been sown, and in March 1764 people began to die of hunger. Between the twenty-seventh and the twenty-ninth of July 1861 the town rose in arms for the Bourbons: the repression came on the thirtieth, forty-five people were killed, among them a doctor and a priest, and the village was sacked and burned. In September 1943, with a German gun battery nearby, the whole population sheltered in the railway tunnel at Scaffa.