Sarno

Sarno gives its name to the river that rises here, from the karst springs at the foot of Monte Saro: waters that irrigate the most fertile plain in Campania and that for centuries turned mills and workshops. The town proper was born in the eighth century, at the foot of the castle founded there by the Lombard duke of Benevento; in 970 the gastaldate was raised to a county, and soon afterwards Sarno became a bishop's see. The castle still commands from above, and below there remain the cathedral with its crypt, the confraternity churches and the medieval quarter of San Matteo, with a tower of the old castle.

On the fifth of May 1998 half the comune's territory was struck by rapid flows of mud. The landslide hit Sarno together with the neighbouring towns of Quindici, Bracigliano and Siano, destroyed a great many houses and killed a hundred and thirty-seven people in Sarno alone. In viale Margherita stands the monument that remembers them. The town rebuilt and went back to doing what it has always done: the river, the river park, the tomato fields of the plain. And there is a detail that says how people here stand on their land: the local civil protection association is called I Sarrastri, after the ancient people of the Sarno valley. At the foot of the valley, the excavations of Pompeii are a quarter of an hour away.