Sant'Angelo a Fasanella

On the top of Costa Palomba, a few kilometres from the village, there is a warrior carved into the rock: he wears a chiton, holds a shield and an axe, is life-size and looks west. They call him the Antece, which in the Cilento dialect means the Ancient One, and they date him between the fifth and the fourth century before Christ; he may be a god or a hero. The other thing cut into the rock is the grotto of San Michele Arcangelo, a rock church and the seat of a Benedictine community: at the entrance, at the foot of the jambs, stand a lion and a lioness of archaic workmanship, and inside there are fourteenth-century frescoes.

The name holds two villages together. Fasanella was a town that Frederick II had razed to the ground in 1246 to punish Pandolfo di Fasanella, who had conspired against him; the hamlet of Sant'Angelo took up its name, and a pheasant ended up on the municipal arms, a canting device that plays on the sound, although the place name is said to come in fact from the Greek Phasis. The village, meanwhile, has arranged itself on three levels, and its quarters are still called Above the land, Inside the land and Below the land.