San Pietro al Tanagro

Paolo Eterni, a historian of the Vallo di Diano writing in the sixteen hundreds, said that the castle at the foot of the hill was built in devotion to Saint Peter «when he passed through the Valley on his return to Italy from Asia, at the beginning of Nero's reign». Read plainly, that sentence says San Pietro was founded under Nero, and by the apostle himself. Others give the foundation, together with that of the hamlet of La Torre, to the counts of Caiano, of the Norman family of the Altavilla, in the twelfth century — and the sources themselves judge even this version unlikely, because from about then the whole valley belonged to the Sanseverino, counts of Marsico, whom people here called the Marsicani di Diano. What is documented is humbler and later: from the twelve hundreds the settlement appears among the casali of the State of Diano, although it turns up in the Angevin registers, for tax purposes, only from the fourteen hundreds; a seventeenth-century document says that in the thirteen hundreds the casale belonged to the Carrano of Diano and was already joined to the casale of La Torre; and in 1541 the casale of San Pietro obtained its emancipation from that of Diano, on which it had depended. Beside the church of Santa Maria del Piano the convent of the Friars Minor was completed in 1661, and the Napoleonic laws suppressed it.

In September 1806 the Napoleonic troops of general Masséna crossed the Vallo di Diano. At San Pietro a group of armed villagers fired on them and killed a captain commanding a company; the French put the village to fire and sword and razed it to the ground. The people rebuilt, and a few years later they also rebuilt the parish church from scratch, because the old one was too small to hold them all. Then, on the night between the sixteenth and the seventeenth of December 1857, a violent earthquake devastated the Vallo di Diano. San Pietro had eight victims, many of them very young — and a ninth, who died under the ruins of the prison of Polla, where he happened to be. In 1863, after unification, the comune added «al Tanagro» to its name, from the river that runs through the valley. And in 1899 a chapel dedicated to the Crocifisso was built on the summit of Monte Ausiliatrice, with the feast that came with it: since then that mountain has been called Monte Crocifisso.