Sacco

The name comes from the Latin saccus, or the Greek saccos, and means exactly what it sounds like: a closed place, with no way out. The land bears it out. Sacco lies inside the Cilento National Park, at the bottom of a valley that opens only where the river Sammaro rises, and just over five hundred people live there. On a sheer crag stand the dry-stone walls of Sacco Vecchio, the earlier village: a fortress, a ring of walls and a church the Basilian monks called Zatalampe, «I seek the light».

Between the ninth and the eleventh century that crag was abandoned and the people came down to the foot of Monte Motola. The new church was finished in 1056, two years after the schism between Rome and Constantinople, and the patron saint changed along with the Church: the Latin Saint Sylvester the pope took the place of the Greek Saint Nicholas. In the summer of 1656 the plague killed more than six inhabitants out of ten; it stopped on the second of August, the feast of Our Lady of the Angels, and that day has been the village festival ever since.