Sanza lies under Monte Cervati, one of the highest peaks in Campania, and its territory is all hidden water. At the spring of Varco la Peta the Bussento rises, the only karst river that runs entirely within Italy: further down it sinks underground near Caselle in Pittari and comes back to the surface at the caves of Morigerati; its name comes from the box that grows along its banks. Higher up is the swallow hole of Vallevona, which in dialect they call Affonnaturo: it is reached through a tunnel dug into the mountain, and inside the warm damp air creates a microclimate where plants and animals live that have no business at that altitude.
Before the Romans the Sontini lived here, listed by Pliny the Elder among the peoples of the Lucanian confederation; the ancient settlement, Sontia, probably stood in the plain of contrada Agno, where Lucanian pottery and Roman gravestones have come to light. The Sontini never got on with Rome — the Pyrrhic wars, the Second Punic War, probably the Social War — and Sontia was razed to the ground more than once for it. Far closer to our own time, in 1857, the last act of Carlo Pisacane's expedition was played out here: the people of Sanza killed eighty-three survivors.
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📅 Every year, on 18 September
One of the patrons of Sanza is Saint Sabinus the Martyr, celebrated on 18 September; the other patron, Our Lady of the Snow, is carried on the shoulders of the "Marunnari" up to Monte Cervati on 26 July.
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 Sanza, but an easy day trip away.
