Monte San Giacomo

At Monte San Giacomo the water does something that is normal here and nowhere else: it disappears underground and comes back further on. The territory, all limestone, is full of closed basins where the rain gathers and is swallowed — at the Vallicelli and at Pian di Varlacarla the swallow holes still work, while at Fossetelle and Pegliera they have silted up, and there the water leaves so slowly that small temporary lakes form which can last most of the wet season. The Varlacarla swallow hole, which the cavers also call Grava della Funnatura, drains by itself a closed basin of about two square kilometres and feeds a muddy, partly flooded conduit: since 1968 the Association of Roman Speleologists has been exploring the system, and in its upper branch it found two prehistoric burials. Somebody, thousands of years ago, went down there to bury their dead.

The waters, moreover, have names here that are worth the journey by themselves. The main torrent is called Zia Francesca, Aunt Frances: it rises at the Capo di Fiume resurgence, that is at the point where the karst system gives back what it took, cuts a narrow valley and at Scarroni becomes a real canyon. From the northeastern slope of Monte Cervati comes down instead the Fosso dell'Acqua che Suona, the ditch of the water that sounds, fed by the spring of the same name and by the Fontana degli Zingari, which crosses this territory and then, entering that of Sassano, changes its name and becomes the Peglio torrent. The comune lies in the national park of Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni, rises from four hundred and fifty metres to more than seventeen hundred, and the village stands at 669 metres, at the foot of the Croce della Difesa.