Here farming is above all market gardening, and from this village the tomato known all over the world took its name. The name of the village, however, is far older: it appears for the first time in a letter of pope Gregory I of 601, addressed to the abbot of the monastery of San Giorgio in Orvieto, where a Benedictine monastery is mentioned situated in fundo Marciano, destroyed by the Lombards; with the form San Marzano the place is cited in a deed of sale of 963 kept in the abbey of the Santissima Trinità at Cava de' Tirreni. The valley was inhabited much earlier: the first traces lie between the ninth and the sixth century before Christ, with necropolises of about one thousand four hundred pit tombs attributed to the Sarrastri, and in 1903 the archaeologist Ettore Pais led here a campaign of excavations that brought to light materials of the ninth and the eighth centuries.
In 1220 Frederick II granted San Marzano to the abbey of Montevergine; shortly before 1234 it passed to Guidone II Filangieri and remained with the family until 1269, when it was confiscated from Riccardo II Filangieri, who had sided with Conradin of Swabia against Charles I of Anjou. It was an autonomous università under the name of «Terra di San Marzano», as a deed of 1521 calls it; in the sixteenth century it became a barony of the Del Tufo, and at the beginning of the seventeenth a marquisate of the Mastrilli, who together with the other communities of the valley went to law against Alfonso Piccolomini, count of Celano and feudal lord of Scafati, over a dam he had built on the Sarno which was damaging the local people. Around 1678 the title passed by inheritance to Gentile III Albertini and stayed with that family until the abolition of feudal rights, in 1806. The modern village is the work of two mayors: Vincenzo Pisani, who in 1871 began the new town hall, inaugurated in 1877, and Paolo Samengo, who in 1910 brought gas lighting and in the following years electric light, the telephone and the first drinking-water main.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 3 February; in September it is repeated with fireworks and street vendors
San Marzano sul Sarno celebrates Saint Blaise on 3 February, mainly with religious ceremonies, and again in September, with both religious moments and civil celebrations, fireworks and street vendors.
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 San Marzano sul Sarno, but an easy day trip away.
