Padula

Padula is famous for the charterhouse of San Lorenzo, one of the largest monasteries in Italy and a world heritage site, and it carries a name that promises nothing monumental: it comes from the Latin palus, marsh, because a marsh really did lie across the plain below. That is the key to everything else. Floods tormented the whole valley, and drainage was long opposed by the local nobles, whom it suited to keep the quarrels between villages alive. On Wednesday 27 October 1839 the Fabbricato torrent burst its banks, destroyed two thirds of the municipal territory and submerged the charterhouse; the flooding went on until the channel was finally regulated and diverted.

Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century the lords of Padula lived elsewhere and had given up administering criminal justice: what came of it was a small oasis of freedom, where neither the comune nor its citizens could be tried, though that took nothing away from the poverty. In 1806 the monks left the charterhouse by royal decree and the French army carried off its goods and its works of art. In 1857 Carlo Pisacane arrived here with his three hundred, certain of finding a popular rising: instead he found the local patriots arrested, the king's guards waiting for him and a clergy handing out false directions, and his companions were massacred. Three years later two men of Padula, Vincenzo Padula and Antonio Sant'Elmo, were among the Thousand who landed at Marsala.