Castel San Giorgio

Hannibal passed this way with his elephants. The Carthaginian commander crossed the «Montagna Spaccata» with his soldiers and his beasts and stopped to rest in the area of Campomanfoli, today a hamlet of the comune, before putting Nuceria Alfaterna to fire and sword: since then that pass has been called Passo dell'Orco, from the nickname the local people had found for him. The territory was in antiquity part of Nuceria Alfaterna itself, and its position as a hinge between the Agro nocerino-sarnese and the Irno valley has put it in the middle of nearly everything that has happened in these parts. Until the unification of Italy the comune was called simply San Giorgio: the «Castel» was added by a prefectural decree of 4 January 1863.

At the end of the nineteenth century a good many stonecutters from here — above all from Lanzara — and a good many smiths left for Egypt and worked on the building of the Aswan dam. In the village older things remain: the church of the Salvatore, at Aiello, is mentioned in a document of 986 and has been destroyed and rebuilt several times; the sanctuary of Santa Maria a Castello, on the hill of Sant'Apollinare, is a fortress of Lombard origin inside which a church was built around 1300, and from up there one sees the whole Agro as far as Pompeii, Ischia and Capri. The monastery of the Crocifisse sisters was instead the feudal lord's own dwelling: baron de Sanctis turned it into a convent in 1712, some forty rooms behind high stone walls, and the suppression laws of 1866 closed it.