Ogliastro Cilento

The name has two possible origins, and they tell very different stories. The first takes it from Olliastrum, made of the Greek aystron, city, and the verb òllymi, to destroy: in that case Ogliastro would have been built after the devastation of nearby Agropoli, and its name would be the memory of somebody else's ruin. The second, soberer, traces it to the medieval Latin oleastrum, the wild olive — and this reading, which the source itself judges the likelier, is the one the comune has chosen: in the coat of arms there is an olive tree growing on a hill. The first historical attestations date from 1059, although the place seems to have been inhabited much earlier.

For centuries Ogliastro was a pertinence of Agropoli and a fief of the bishop of Paestum, and so it remained until 1556, when it was sold off to the Spigadore family; from then on it changed hands often — Bonito, de Clario, Altomare, de Conciliis — down to the marquises de Stefano, who got it in 1741. The territory is a constellation of small places, and their names are worth reading. The most populous hamlet is Eredita, «the inheritance», which appears in a document of 1103 in the form Heredita; Finocchito, on the eastern side towards Cicerale, counts a few dozen inhabitants; and among the localities made of a handful of scattered farmhouses are Ginestre, Santa Caterina, Santa Maria della Grazia — and Purgatorio.