Montano Antilia

In 1828 the revolt of the Filadelfi set out from this town, one of the Cilento risings that came twenty years before eighteen forty-eight and thirty before the insurrections that led to unification. It was not led by one man alone: the landowner don Pietro Bianchi and his wife Alessandrina Tambasco Bianchi, together with the canon De Luca. It is rare to find a woman named as the leader of an insurrection of those years, and this source names her. Husband and wife paid for their choice with their lives. The palace where they lived, which had belonged to the Monforte di Laurito, the feudal lords of the place, carries on its façade a plaque placed in 1964 in memory of the risings and of the two of them; the palace is still called Bianchi, after their name and not after the lords'.

Before then Montano Antilia was not a comune but a casale, that is a cluster of houses dependent on another town, and it was called simply Montagna: it belonged to Cuccaro Vetere, and the kingdom's numerations, the censuses of the day, record it from the sixteenth century. Only later did it detach itself and take the name of the mountain behind it, the Antilia. The settlement climbs the slope against the wooded flanks, and the two hamlets, Abatemarco and Massicelle, lie lower down. In the mother church of the Santissima Annunziata the eighteenth-century frescoes by local artists live alongside a contemporary pictorial cycle added in 2013. And in the Scala Santa a restoration brought back to light a fresco showing Mary with the body of Christ taken down from the cross upon her knees.