Minori

The name is a comparison. Minori and Maiori take their names from their rivers, the Reginna Minor and the Reginna Maior, told apart by size; then the Latin adjectives ate the name of the river, and what is left is two towns called the smaller and the larger. Under the level ground of the town lies the oldest thing on the coast: a Roman maritime villa of the first century, of which the lower floor survives with its frescoes and mosaics, probably a patrician's. Eruptions of Vesuvius buried it under the debris that the water carried downstream, and around the fourth century the settlement disappears from the records.

Then the town came back down to the sea. Tradition tells that the inhabitants had withdrawn to the inland hill of Forcella and that in the seventh century, when the relics of Saint Trofimena were found on the beach below, they came down again to rebuild along the shore and dedicated a church to her. The torrent did the rest: from the mountain to the sea the paper mills and the grain mills lined up, and in the fourteenth century came the trappeti, which used the mills' own technique to press a very fine oil. In 1954, in the Salerno flood, the same water filled the basements and killed three people. Since 1997 the whole territory has been a World Heritage Site along with the rest of the Amalfi coast.