Roccapiemonte

The name is a description: rocca at the foot of the mountain. The rocca of San Quirico was built in 1042 by the Lombard prince Guaimario IV of Salerno on monte Solano, to control the valleys and the main roads of the agro nocerino-sarnese; around the fortification the first settlement was born, which between the twelfth and the thirteenth century came down along the slopes taking the name Roccapiedimonte, attested also in the Catalogus Baronum. In 1847 the English traveller and landscape painter Edward Lear passed this way and described monte Solano as «a little sugar-loaf mountain», because of its conical shape. Of the old rocca there remain today substantial ruins of the triple wall circuit, of the gates and of a cylindrical tower: what reduced it so were the earthquakes, in particular those of 1631 and 1857, and the Allied bombings of the Second World War.

For four centuries, moreover, this was a comune divided into three. In the fourteenth century the territory was shared between the università of Rocca Corporis, Rocca Monasterii and Rocca Casalium, and the division stayed essentially unchanged until the abolition of feudality, in 1806. To put them back together took a family: in 1625 Ettore Ravaschieri, prince of Satriano, bought the fief for thirty-two thousand six hundred ducats, and between 1665 and 1689 count Antonio Ravaschieri progressively reunified the three università, while Aniello Nicola Ravaschieri obtained the title of first duke of Roccapiemonte. The Ravaschieri moved the lordly residence from the rocca to the palace in the village, and in their villa had built in 1720 the chapel of the Addolorata, designed by Ferdinando Sanfelice, which keeps a marble relief by Giovanni Duprè and the sarcophagi of the last duke and his wife. The male line died out with Vincenzo Ravaschieri Fieschi, fifth duke, who died in 1895; the last descendant, princess Ornella, died without direct heirs in 1975.