Roccagloriosa

On the ridge of Monte Capitenali, which divides the valley of the Mingardo from that of the Bussento, there was a Lucanian town, and of that town we know how it governed itself. On a fragment of a bronze tablet found during the excavations, of the fourth or third century before Christ, there is a statute concerning the civil institutional order of the place: that alone is enough to say that the civil and administrative life of the Lucanians was a complex business. Between the fourth and the third century the town built itself a wall of limestone blocks, leaving the necropolis outside, and inside it laid out the houses in rectangular blocks. But the walls held far more ground than was needed: of the twenty-six or twenty-seven hectares enclosed, only eighteen or twenty were suitable for human activity, and not even those were densely built — clusters of houses with stretches between them where hardly any trace of human activity shows. And there were houses outside as well, on a slightly lower plateau; the archaeologists say no difference can be seen between those inside and those outside, which suggests large family groups, clans, whose members were not all of the same rank and whom the wall did not separate.

Then the town was destroyed and its people moved, more than once. In the first century before Christ the survivors of the destruction of Orbitania built a new settlement on the rock ridge called Armo — Patrìzia, today's Rocchetta — which lived until the fourth century after Christ. At the end of that century the general Stilicho landed in the gulf of Policastro and found this country suitable for encamping his troops; his soldiers sacked and destroyed the nearby settlements, and the people of Patrizia had to merge with the original nucleus. Out of that forced union a new place was born, around a small church built in 412 and dedicated to the Madonna; the area is still called Rocca. That church is the oldest in the comune and it is called the Gloriosa, the Glorious Mother of God — and the name of the village is exactly that: the rock and the Gloriosa. In the sixth century, after the Bulgar invasions, a castle was built by the Rocca, and Aquavena, Celle Bulgheria and Rocchetta took shape; in 590 the Lombards came, and they enlarged the castle; in the twelve hundreds it was one of Frederick II's castra exempta, those whose keeping the emperor reserved directly to the ruling house. On the third of August 1806 the French sacked and burned it — and what the fire had left standing was pulled down in the nineteen-fifties. The Gloriosa too has been destroyed twice: by the French in 1806 and by the earthquake of 1848.