The highest church of Piaggine is not in the village: it is inside a natural cave, on top of Monte Cervati, at more than eighteen hundred metres, and it is the chapel of the Madonna della Neve, Our Lady of the Snows, to which people climb in pilgrimage on the fourth and fifth of August. Another, the Madonna del Vivo, stands on the mountain of that name, at around twelve hundred metres, and is kept at the mid-August holiday. Below, the village is made of narrow lanes, stone houses and a few noble palaces, with a medieval bridge that strides over the river Calore right in the middle of the built-up area; the Calore Lucano, for that matter, rises from the same Cervati. The churches of the centre are San Pietro, which goes back to the thirteenth century, and San Nicola and the Madonna del Carmine, both of the sixteenth.
The village's name, until the unification of Italy, was Piaggine Soprane, and it served to tell it from Piaggine Sottane, which today is called Valle dell'Angelo: after the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy only Piaggine was left. Between 1811 and 1860 the place belonged to the district of Laurino, in the circuit of Vallo, and after unification to the district of Laurino in the circuit of Vallo della Lucania. Its origins, they say, lie around the year one thousand, when a community of nomadic shepherds found among these mountains green pastures and the water of the river. Today Piaggine is inside the national park of the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni, surrounded by thick woods such as the Cervatello and that of Mercori; and from here came the brigand Giuseppe Tardio.
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📅 Every year, on 6 December
On 6 December Piaggine celebrates its patron Saint Nicholas of Bari, one of several religious feasts marking the town's calendar, followed a week later by Saint Lucy.
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.
