Palomonte

The town sits on a rocky knoll between the valley of the Tanagro and the group of the Marzano and Eremita mountains, and its almost conical shape is a fairly rare trait. In the small plain to the north, until the nineteenth century, lay the lake of Palo, at 430 metres of altitude and with a perimeter of eight kilometres: it was drained, and of the lake what mostly remains is its name in the place names. The town too changed name: under the kingdom of Naples and then of the Two Sicilies it was called Palo and was a hamlet administered by Contursi, in the district of Campagna; it became Palomonte only with a royal decree of 1862.

Out in the countryside, on the boundary with Contursi and Sicignano, stands the sanctuary of Santa Maria di Sperlonga, built in the tenth century. In the apse are frescoes datable to around the eleventh century, with saint Cosmas, saint Sabas and what remains of the Assumption, and higher up the Madonna Hodegetria venerated at Constantinople: the trace of the Greek cenobite monks who came up the peninsula fleeing the persecutions of the Saracens. Beside the apse is the statue of the Madonna di Sperlonga, which tradition says was found in a nearby cave after an apparition. The mother church of Santa Croce, instead, rises on the walls of an earlier building that an earthquake at the end of the seventeenth century razed to the ground, carrying off with it the whole archive kept inside: the oldest documents preserved today are dated 1725. The Lombard castle at the highest point was destroyed entirely by the earthquake of 1980 and only a few pieces of wall can be seen; the town hall is the former Capuchin convent, built between 1582 and 1602.