In 1954 the anthropologist Massimo Cresta came to Rofrano to study how people ate. He analysed the eating habits of two hundred and twenty-six families out of the six hundred and one then living in the comune, and of those families more than one in three lived in poor socio-economic conditions; the research was filmed by the director Virgilio Tosi on behalf of the National Institute of Nutrition, in collaboration with the Istituto Luce. Out of those studies came the interest in what we now call the Mediterranean diet, that is the regime of cereals and vegetables typical of the Cilento, which went with a low incidence of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disease. It is worth holding the two things together: the way of eating that the world would later adopt in order to stay well was, here, the way of eating of people who had nothing else. In 2006, in a ranking of the comuni of Campania, Rofrano came out as the poorest, with a little under seven thousand euros per head.
The village lies in the southern Cilento, inside the national park, among woods and halfway between Sala Consilina, Vallo della Lucania and Sapri. On the highest knoll stands the church of the Madonna di Grottaferrata: before, it was a monastery founded by Greek Basilian monks, settled here around the year one thousand, and the name comes from the bond with the abbey of Grottaferrata in Lazio, founded by Saint Nilus. That bond is documented: in the chrysobull of Roger II, of 1131, the king grants to Leontius, abbot of Grottaferrata, the church of Santa Maria di Rofrano with the fief attached to it, and along with it the right of asylum and criminal jurisdiction over the monastery. Popular tradition, for its part, tells of peasants who found a small statue of the Madonna among the brambles and began to dig the foundations, but every morning found the holes filled in with earth; so they asked her to point out the spot, and on the fifteenth of August snow fell only there, where the abbey stands today. The feast is on the eighth of September, and it is celebrated in Melbourne too, where people from Rofrano are many.
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📅 Every year, on 8 September
On 8 September Rofrano, a municipality of 1,655 inhabitants in the province of Salerno, celebrates the Madonna di Grottaferrata, a feast also held in Melbourne.
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.
Outside Rofrano, but an easy day trip away.
