Omignano

In the parish church of San Nicola di Bari, which is of the sixteenth century, are preserved the remains of Giulia Rocca, whom local sources name as the lost love of Giambattista Vico. It is the kind of fact that shifts the way one looks at a village: in a church of the Cilento, inside a comune of little more than fifteen hundred inhabitants, rests a woman who appears at the margins of the biography of one of the most difficult and most read philosophers in Europe. Omignano, moreover, also has two noble houses, the seventeenth-century De Feo, which was the residence of the Mazzacane princes, and palazzo Gorga: a sign that here, on the eastern slopes of Monte Stella, families of consequence used to pass.

The name, on the other hand, has not yet made up its mind. For some it comes from the medieval Latin dominicanus, which denoted an estate belonging to a lord — and it would fit, because in the territory there is still a wooded holding called Donnico. For others it derives from an Etruscan name, Umenia, from which Umenianus. The first notice of the village is of 1047, in Lombard times. Then, for more than a century, Omignano was administered from another village: from 1811 to 1860 it lay in the district of Pollica, and from 1860 to 1927 in the mandamento of Pollica, that is it depended on a comune on the coast. Today the whole territory lies inside the national park of Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni, on the flank of Monte Stella, and the village has a station of its own on the southern Tyrrhenian railway.