Ceraso

The name is the cherry tree: the terrace of the Palistro river was full of them, and the Greek kerasos leads to the same plant. The place grew as a knot of roads — the salt road running from the roads of Velia down to the Ionian coast, the road along the river, the one that climbed to the pass and on into the Vallo di Diano — and the first document that names it is a parchment of pope Eugene III of the sixth of May 1149, recognising to the abbey of Cava a monastery of Santa Barbara ubi Cerasus dicitur, where the place is called Ceraso. Ceraso became the head of the comune only in the Napoleonic age, because it lay at the centre of the villages that would become its hamlets.

From here came Giovanni Lancillotti, professor at the Real Collegio del Salvatore in Naples, whose Italian Grammar of 1777 was then adopted in every school of the kingdom and studied by the king's own children. His family had built, in their own garden but with the entrance on the square, the seventeenth-century church of San Silvestro that gave the square its name: in the nineteen-twenties it was demolished to straighten an awkward bend in the provincial road, and the chapel meant to replace it was never built. Two street names here are decrees rather than history as well: in those same years the ministry laid down that every comune should name a street after Guglielmo Marconi and every chief town should give its main street the name of Rome. Via Roma was the old road of the Royal Posts, via Marconi the old road of the bridge.