Santa Marina

Santa Marina has 3,166 inhabitants in southern Cilento, at 425 metres on Monte Tempone, looking over the gulf of Policastro. Down on the coast is its best-known hamlet, Policastro Bussentino, which is far older than the main town: it was founded in 471 BC by the Greeks of Rhegion under the name of Pyxous, as a base for trade between the Strait and the gulf of Taranto; then it became Roman Buxentum, and from the seventh century, when the Byzantines put a castle there, it was called Policastro. Santa Marina itself was born in those same years, and refugees made it: people who had fled the Byzantine Empire during the iconoclasm, and who built here a church of the Orthodox rite dedicated to Saint Marina, facing east.

When Robert Guiscard arrived in 1055, the village of Santa Marina was given a precise function: the seat for the administration of justice for the whole district was placed here, and later the tribunal with its prison — the courthouse and the lord's residence were the same building. The coast, meanwhile, was hit again and again: the Genoese fleet destroyed Policastro in 1320, in the sixteenth century the Turkish pirates came, and in 1806 the castle was brought down by an English bombardment. The last blow is recent: under Fascism Santa Marina lost its status as a comune despite a popular revolt, and became one again only after the fall of the regime.