Casal Velino

Until 1893 this town was called Casalicchio, from the medieval Latin casalicolus, the little hamlet: a name that said exactly what it was and nothing more. Then it changed it to Casal Velino, looking a few kilometres along the coast to where Velia stood, the Greek city its founders called Elea. In the Cilento dialect, though, the place is still Casalicchio. It sits on a hill inside the national park of the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni, with its own marina and harbour below, and in 2010 its beach was awarded the blue flag.

There is a small geographical oddity here worth telling: the railway station that carries the name of Casal Velino is not in Casal Velino. It stands in the territory of Castelnuovo Cilento, in the settlement that was once called Casalvelino Scalo and is now simply Velina, and it has been out of service since the nineteen nineties; the station people actually use is the one at Ascea, which is yet another municipality. Down at the Marina, meanwhile, the parish church of San Matteo was built between 1970 and 1974 and decorated by the Neapolitan ceramist Giuseppe Macedonio, and the harbour is a stop on the hydrofoil line that in summer links Naples and Sorrento to Marina di Camerota.