Colliano

Colliano has 3,764 inhabitants at six hundred and thirty metres, in the upper valley of the Sele. The name comes from the Roman gens Collia, and a good deal of Rome is left in the territory: funerary monuments with inscriptions still partly legible, a cinerary urn and two Doric capitals in travertine at Macchia, a dolium for provisions at Zaparone. There, on the remains of an imperial villa, between the eighth and the eleventh century the abbey of San Lorenzo settled, closing in the thirteenth.

To defend themselves from the Saracens the inhabitants climbed onto the hill, giving shape to the two centres of Colliano and Collianello. In 1140 the Norman Roberto di Quaglietta enlarged the stronghold and added walls, gates and bastions: of that system only the gate of the Saints remained, which people ended up calling the Fountain gate, because it led out towards the public fountain. The earthquake of 1466 destroyed all the villages of the upper valley; the church of San Martino at Collianello, ruined after the plague, was restored in 1762.