Cetara

The name states the trade: it comes from the Latin cetaria, the tuna trap, or from cetari, the sellers of big fish, and the Latin word probably comes from the Greek ketèia, which again means tuna trap — though alternative readings are not lacking, from the caeditaria of cleared ground to the citrus of the lemons. The fish is in the documents from the very beginning: from 1030 Cetara owed the bishop of Amalfi the ius piscariae, that is the tithe of the catch. In 1120 the port passed to the abbey of Cava, which drew from its landing places a mooring tax that varied according to where the ship came from: one rate for Gaetans, Sorrentines, Calabrians and Sicilians, another for Genoese, Pisans and Romans. For centuries the men left in March and April for Algeria and Morocco to fish anchovies and salt them down, coming home in autumn after supplying the markets of Messina, Genoa and Livorno: from that trade comes the colatura di alici, the liquid drawn from fermenting anchovies, heir of the Roman garum.

This stretch of coast was not only attacked. In 880 a band of armed Muslims settled at Cetara with the blessing of the bishop of Naples, Athanasius the Second, who in this way could strike at his own enemies of Capua, Salerno, Spoleto and Benevento; and already in 842 and in 879, at the time of the siege of Salerno, the village was a Saracen stronghold. Later it was Cetara's turn to be on the other side: in the sixteenth century a Turkish fleet led by Sinan Pasha carried much of the population off into slavery, and those who refused to board were killed. It was after that raid that in 1567 the Spanish viceroy ordered nineteen watchtowers to be built along the Amalfi coast: the one at Cetara, restored, is today the museum of the sea. The place remained a village dependent on Vietri until a royal decree, on the fifteenth of November 1833, detached it and made it a comune.