Patron saint festival In 300 days
Feast of Saint Lawrence
📅 Every year, on 10 August
On 10 August Scala, a municipality of 1,518 inhabitants in the province of Salerno, celebrates its patron Saint Lawrence (san Lorenzo).
It is written everywhere that Scala became a bishop's see in 987, with the birth of the metropolitan see of Amalfi. Recent scholarship does not accept it: the name of Scala among the suffragan sees comes from an interpolation of the Chronicle of the Bishops of Amalfi, made by a scholar born in Scala, Giovan Battista D'Afflitto, who worked with Ughelli on the Amalfitan ecclesiastical province; and in the text he sent it was even specified that the bishop of Scala was exempt from paying the cathedraticum. The motive can be guessed: to make his own diocese older than the one facing it, Ravello, erected in 1086 and subject directly to the Holy See from October 1090. In all likelihood the diocese of Scala was born towards the end of the eleventh century, precisely as an answer to Ravello, and the first documented bishop is a certain Alessandro, in 1118. The contest ended with both being cancelled: on 31 July 1603 Scala was united aeque principaliter to Ravello, and on 27 June 1818 the two dioceses were suppressed.
The town stands on a rocky height about four hundred metres above the sea, and an old chronicle has it founded in the fourth century by Roman castaways bound for Constantinople: that is not proved. What is proved is what such a position was for. With Ravello, Scala was the fortress of the duchy of Amalfi, and it paid for it: sacked and burned by the Norman Robert Guiscard in 1073, destroyed by the Pisans some sixty years later, in the clashes with Roger II between 1135 and 1137, then broken into by the armies of Otto of Brunswick in 1210 and by the rebels of the Vespers. The castle of Scala Maior, on monte Petraro, and the castrum Scalelle at Pontone are still partly there. But the people of Scala traded as well: from the eleventh century they had a proper merchant colony in Naples, with a church over by Porta Nolana. And here Alfonso Maria de' Liguori founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Scala 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Scala
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Scala, but an easy day trip away.
Villa Pallavicino 📍 Salerano Canavese · 2.8 km The Second Empire villa gazing over the morainic amphitheatre of Ivrea from a hill above Salerano Canavese. Torre di Pramotton 📍 Donnas · 15 km A twelfth-century hexagonal tower at 540 metres, signalling to the Pont-Saint-Martin castle and the fort of Bard. castello di Castellamonte 📍 Castellamonte · 16 km Seven gates in the curtain wall and a fief split into 271 points of jurisdiction. Castello di Suzey 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 15 km A ruin above Ivéry: in 1351 the Vallaise held an Ivrea merchant prisoner here for ransom. Bard Fortress 📍 Bard · 19 km Rebuilt in the 19th century, this imposing Savoy fortress is a masterpiece of military engineering in the Aosta Valley. Pont Saint-Martin 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 16 km Two thousand years of traffic on a single span: the boldest flat arch left from Roman times.