Calvanico

Calvanico is surrounded by mountains on almost every side, and the highest is Monte Mai, which reaches sixteen hundred metres. Among those peaks is one that gives its name to half the village: Pizzo San Michele, where according to the medieval legend the archangel appeared, and where for this reason a church was raised in his honour. In the seventeenth century a statue was dedicated to him made entirely of silver. But the finest thing is that even the wind carries that name: the mountain breeze that in summer comes down to cool the village is called here the calata di San Michele, the descent of Saint Michael. A saint who is at once a summit, a church, a statue and a wind.

The rest is decided by the climate, which here is harder than one would expect of a village that can see the sea. On the Mai mountains and on Pizzo San Michele more than two thousand millimetres of rain fall each year, and with cold outbreaks from the Balkans the snowstorms reach right down into the village. On this slope grow beech woods, oaks and holm oaks, and above all chestnuts and hazels: the chestnuts of Calvanico belong to the Serino protected quality, the hazelnuts to the family of the tonda di Giffoni. The natural area of Frassineto, some eighty hectares of wood shared with Fisciano and crossed by four paths, takes its name from the ash trees. Two dates, finally, that the village does not forget: in 1973, in the confraternity room of the church of the Salvatore, skeletons from the first half of the eighteenth century were found; and in 1980 the earthquake badly damaged the municipal territory.