Castelcivita

In the caves that open below the village, towards the river Calore, archaeologists have found, one above the other, the traces of two different humanities: Neanderthals, between forty-seven and forty-three thousand years ago, and the first modern Europeans, between forty-three and forty-two thousand. It is one of the places where the question of how the one replaced the other is actually studied, on the material itself. The caves of Castelcivita are also the reason most visitors come up here: they lie on the valley floor, at the foot of the Alburni, inside the national park of the Cilento.

The village's name is younger than it looks: it was made in 1863, by royal decree, joining the name of the village of Castelluccia to that of Civita, which stood higher up. In the papers of 1171, and later in the Angevin and Aragonese ones, the place is simply Castelluccia — a name that goes back to a small Roman stronghold, a Castella, whose lines could still be read in the arrangement of walls and towers. Under the church of San Cono there is a crypt held to have been the seat of the bishop of Paestum in the fifth or sixth century, obtained by reading in a Christian way the buildings of the old forum. Around that church the village has four quarters set at right angles on two main streets; the complete ring of walls is attributed to a great feudatory who had it built by order of Charles I of Anjou. The houses fall in steps down the spur, at five hundred and eighty-seven metres.