Perdifumo

The name has nothing to do with smoke. Perdifumo stands near a torrent, and in the Middle Ages that earned it the name pes-de-flumine, the foot of the river, which in dialect became per-de-fiume. The village was born in the eleventh century by absorbing the people of a nearby settlement, Sant'Arcangelo, which had grown up around an Italo-Greek monastery: they had gathered under the monks' protection and then, when conditions improved, moved to ground better suited to farming. In 1083, when somebody counted the vassals belonging to each of the Cilento monasteries, Sant'Arcangelo was found to have some fifty households — and by then they must already have been living here. The war of the Vespers destroyed Perdifumo completely; it was rebuilt, and it stayed with the abbey of Cava until 1412, when pope Gregory XII passed all its Cilento fiefs to king Ladislao of Durazzo; in 1436 Alfonso of Aragon granted Perdifumo to the Sanseverino in absolute dominion, leaving the abbey nothing but spiritual jurisdiction.

Then the village changed masters eight times in three centuries, by sale and by dowry — a daughter's dowry carried it to the Caracciolo, a marriage brought it back to them a century later, and it ended with the Filomarino, princes of Roccadaspide, who held it until feudalism was abolished in 1806. Of all those owners, only one wrote himself on the fountain. Giacomo Guindacio, a Neapolitan nobleman, had Perdifumo from king Federico d'Aragona when the Sanseverino lost their fiefs after the barons' conspiracy, and kept it as their sub-feudatory when the Sanseverino got them back; and the monumental public fountain with its washing troughs, which he had built, carries two epigraphs for the two moments of that acquisition, one of 1500 and one of 1507. The second speaks to whoever passes: traveller, though you are in a hurry, this sweet spring invites you to take away your thirst, or at least to wet your lips or wash off the sweat, and your road will be the happier — provided you know who gave you this convenience. At Vatolla, the frazione where Giambattista Vico stayed, tradition even points out where he studied: in front of the convent, in the shade of the third olive tree counting from the sea towards the village. And there the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie was built over a pagan temple, and has kept two pieces of it on the façade: two bas-reliefs of bacchanalian feasts.