Cava de' Tirreni

The town's surname is a council resolution: the first inhabitants of the terre de la Cava are said to have been the Tyrrhenians, that is the Etruscans, and on the twenty-seventh of August 1862 the comune decided to add them to its name. The arcaded main street is unique in the South: merchants and pilgrims have walked under its medieval arches for centuries, and the town was called the little Switzerland for its order and its trade. Uphill, the Benedictine abbey of the Santissima Trinità, founded in 1011, keeps a thousand years of codices, cloisters and a Lombard cemetery.

Cava lies in the green valley between Salerno and the Amalfi Coast, of which it is in practice the northern gate: the sea is five kilometres away, Vietri sul Mare and its ceramics ten minutes. The comune is entirely inside the Monti Lattari park and closed off by two ranges, with Monte Finestra passing eleven hundred metres; most people here live not in the centre but in the hamlets scattered over the hills. In the middle of town stands Monte Castello, and it alone is enough to make it rain more here than on the coast a step away. The pistilli — the local sfogliatelle — and the tradition of the trombonieri, with their costumed parades, keep the identity alive.