San Gregorio Magno

Until a little more than a century ago the town looked out over a lake. It was a Pleistocene basin, in the upper valley of the Tanagro, and it was completely drained at the end of the nineteenth century: the landscape you see today, with the hills running down to the valley floor, is therefore much younger than the town that looks at it. In Roman times there was a flourishing pagus here; after the depopulation of the invasions the place was born again as a Benedictine grange, and around the church dedicated to Saint Gregory the Great the hamlet took shape that later took the saint's name and became autonomous in the fourteenth century.

The thing you notice most on arriving is the music. Here the organetto is an old tradition and the local people are attached to it; there are also makers and players of ciaramelle and zampogne, instruments tied to the pastoral life of these mountains. Roberto De Simone came to record some of these tunes and included them in his collection La tradizione in Campania. In the surrounding country there remain the ruins of the settlement of San Zaccaria, which no longer exists, and the caves of via Bacco.