Bracigliano

A flattering story circulated about Bracigliano for a long time: that it was the land of Virgil, and took its name from him. It is local scholarship itself that takes it apart, and with serious arguments: no trace of it is found in the poet's works, nor in the biographies written between the first and the fourth century, and in Campania Virgil mentions only a villa at Naples. The accepted hypothesis is less glorious and more concrete: the name comes from a Roman family name, Braccilius or Procilius, following the rule by which place names ending in ano indicate a family's ownership. The philologist Giovanni Flechia wrote as much back in 1874, explaining too the Neapolitan shifts, the p that becomes b as in Bicentino for Picentino.

The place that really matters lies high up and is called Salto: from the Latin saltus, the pass, the dip between the mountains that connects the basin of Bracigliano with that of Forino, that is the Salerno side with the Avellino side. Up there the shepherds of eight different villages used to climb, and the names still remember it: on the plateau of Camposummo one area is called Tori because bulls were bred there, and at Salto until the nineteenth century the pigs ran free, on acorns and chestnuts by day and shut at evening into a building called the Porchère. Of that same mountain Bracigliano also knows the other face: on 5 May 1998 the landslide that overwhelmed Sarno, Quindici and Siano struck this slope too.