Carciofo di Paestum large round artichoke, grown in the Sele plain
A large, round artichoke head, the Romanesco type: Carciofo di Paestum, grown in the Sele plain since the 1920s, has held IGP status since 2004.
Read more →Until 1929 Bellizzi was three houses. They stood at the crossing of the four roads that led to Calabria, to Salerno, to Montecorvino Rovella and to the railway station, and that crossroads was the point where the day labourers coming down from the hill hamlets were sorted out to work in the plain almost as far as the sea. The plain of the Sele, for all its water and its crops of maize, wheat, wine and oil, was unhealthy and almost uninhabited, above all because of the buffalo herds left to range free. The name appears in 1827 in the provisional cadastre of Montecorvino Rovella, where four plots called Bellizze are listed as belonging to baron Gaetano Bellelli; but the oldest testimony is a Murat decree of 20 June 1811 authorising the building of the carriage road from Bellizzi to Montecorvino.
From 1929 onwards the houses grew where the buffaloes had grazed. Reclamation brought the irrigation canals and the silos, the national road was paved, and canning factories were already working here at the time of the First World War. In 1953 the Maccaferri works were opened, and from 1963 the building site of the motorway to Reggio Calabria turned the territory from rural to urban without any planning instrument at all. In the village they say «Bellizze paese da' accuglitizze», village of mixed people, because those who made it came mostly from elsewhere, and in great part precisely from Montecorvino Rovella. The comune was born from a referendum of 24 April 1988 and from a regional law: officially, on the first of February 1990.
🍝 The flavours of Bellizzi
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Near Bellizzi
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Bellizzi, but an easy day trip away.
tomba del Tuffatore 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 14 km The only Greek painting of the classical age to survive: a man diving into space. Paestum 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 16 km Three names and a single ending: the Greek city that the water slowly ate. Temples of Paestum 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 19 km Three Doric temples standing since the sixth century BCE, and the Tomb of the Diver. Museo archeologico nazionale di Paestum 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 16 km The temples' museum, with the Tomb of the Diver and the metopes of Hera's sanctuary. Tempio di Nettuno 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 16 km The almost complete Doric temple, whose only wrong part is Neptune's name. Tempio di Atena 📍 Capaccio Paestum · 16 km Paestum's most refined temple, used as a church in the middle ages.