Praiano

Between the tenth and the eleventh century Praiano was the place where the doges of the duchy of Amalfi spent the summer. The name comes from praia, beach, and further back from the Greek plagion, which means inclined plane: an honest definition, because here the land is never horizontal. In the Angevin period the Assiola tower was built to defend the town from the sea, and a second tower, that of Grado, watches another stretch of coast. For centuries the town lived on silk, with an important local manufacture that died out in the nineteenth century; what set it back on its feet was coral, discovered in the seabed hereabouts in those very years, and since then fishing and later tourism have taken the place of the looms. The communal coat of arms is not a modern invention: it was drawn from the State Archive of Naples and conforms to the seal of the Universitas of Praiano of the late sixteenth century.

The calendar of feasts tells of a town made of two centres and of a great deal of sea. Praiano has Saint Luke as its patron, the hamlet of Vettica Maggiore has Saint Januarius, and each is celebrated twice a year. But the strangest observance does not wholly belong to this comune: it is the sea procession of the Byzantine painting of the Madonna Posa, which sets out from Positano, stops at the chapel on the island of Gallo Lungo in the Li Galli archipelago, reaches Marina di Praia and stays a few days in the church of the Annunziata, as a guest; then it is carried back with another long procession over the water. A painting that goes visiting from one town to another and then comes home. The church of San Luca goes back to 1123 and keeps sixteenth-century paintings by Giovanni Bernardo Lama; since 1997 the whole coast, and so this stretch too, has been a World Heritage site.