San Rufo

San Rufo stands above six hundred metres, between two mountains — the Spina dell'Ausino and the Cucuzzo delle Puglie — and it stands there for two reasons: to be able to defend itself, and because the wide plain of the Vallo di Diano, down below, was marshy. Between the two mountains opens the passo della Sentinella, and that pass has linked the Vallo di Diano with the valley of the Calore and with the Cilento since prehistoric times. The ancient road that went through it had a name that says everything about the place: the via degli Stranieri, the way of the strangers. People have lived here a very long time, and not always in the same village. The oldest was Casalvetere, which in Roman times flourished near what is now the old part of the town and which disappeared, probably, in the Middle Ages; the stone marker that now stands near the Pellegrino palace, on the main street, came from there. Between the ninth and the tenth century, when the Saracen raids were tormenting the valley, another village was born, Calvanello, at the opposite end from Casalvetere, in a commanding position.

The Romans left more than a village. In the fields near Santa Maria Casenove and Campanella — where the Roman pagi of the territory of Tegianum were — farmers keep turning up finds, and in 1926, at Campanella, the tomb of Gaius Luxilius Macer was found, of the first century after Christ. The inscription celebrates him as undefeated, most probably as a charioteer in the races held at the Campus Martius in Rome: a man of this valley who won at Rome and came home to be buried. Of San Rufo's own beginnings, on the other hand, there is no certainty: most historians put them in the twelve hundreds and attribute them to Gubello Pellegrino, who is said to have built the place in honour of San Rufo, third bishop of Capua. It was a casale of Diano, and it remained a fief of the Pellegrino until the sixteen hundreds, passing then to the Rinaldo and the Laviano families. Little of its artistic patrimony has survived, but there remain buildings of the sixteen and seventeen hundreds with stone portals, and the ruins of the old castle. From 1811 to 1860 the village belonged to the circondario of Polla, in the district of Sala; and until the early eighteen hundreds it was not called San Rufo but Santo Rufo.