Postiglione

Postiglione was born of a flight. In the ninth century the families of Paestum, forced to leave their city because of raids by Saracens and pirates, looked for a defensible place on the Alburni mountains and stopped here. The name, according to the most credited hypothesis, would still keep that of the lost city: Paestum joined to the Greek elios, the sun, or to elaion, the olive; or else it would be the Latin post plus elios, behind the sun. Some derive it from one Postilus, a farmer first a slave and then freed, since the ending in ianus was what the Romans gave to freedmen. And there is the most obvious explanation, the one usually discarded because it seems too easy: the postiglione, that is the driver of the mail coach. Only, that explanation has an object behind it: at Duchessa, along the road the Romans had rebuilt in a double layer and which can still be seen, there really was a posting station where horses and driver were changed.

The fief, which had belonged to the Lombard princes of Salerno, passed to the Normans around 1060, when Robert Guiscard defeated Gisulf, married his sister and left the possession to his brother-in-law. Then the story fills with conspirators. The fief came by marriage to Pandolfo Fasanella, who out of respect for his father-in-law would not take the surname «da Postiglione», as was the custom; Frederick II esteemed him greatly, but when he discovered that Pandolfo was at the head of a palace conspiracy against him he tried every way to capture him, and Pandolfo had no choice but to take refuge with the pope. Frederick then assigned the fief to his own personal physician, Giovanni da Procida. On the emperor's death the exiles came back and were restored to their domains, but some rebelled again: Manfred had nearly all of them imprisoned and executed, and Domenico da Postiglione was taken to Foggia and hanged. The fief went back to the physician.