Ottati stands at 530 metres on the southern slopes of the Alburni, and its name says how it came about: from the Latin optatus, chosen, because the shepherds and herdsmen of Fasanella opted for this spot, rich in pasture, and built the first houses here. Above the village, to the north, rises a cliff that shelters it from the winter cold and is pierced with caves: Basilian monks lived in them, and after the monks they served as shelters for flocks and shepherds. The best known is the cave of Santa Croce, now abandoned.
The dates are disputed: some put the foundation at 1100, some at the year one thousand, and there is the memoir of the notary Vincenzo Fasano — unpublished but widely read in the eighteenth century — according to which Ottati already existed in 1195. What is certain is that the village rose again from the rubble to which Frederick II of Swabia had reduced it, and passed through the hands of the Capece Galeota and then of many families, down to the Caraguso-Mariconda in the eighteenth century. There remain the Dominican convent of 1480, the church of the Annunziata with its stone portal of 1618, the sanctuary of the Madonna del Cardoneto and, on a nearby hill, the ruins of Civita, a rural settlement a thousand years old.
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📅 Every year, on 3 February
On 3 February Ottati, a municipality of 680 inhabitants in the province of Salerno, celebrates its patron Saint Blaise; among the town's sites is the Madonna del Cardoneto.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
