Serre

The territory has the shape of a wedge, because two rivers draw its boundaries: the Sele to the north-west and the Calore lucano to the south. The point where the two meet is called the Jonta, which in dialect means a joint. To the north-east the hills are covered with woods, vineyards and olive groves that give an oil among the best in Campania — Serre is a town of oil — while to the south-west the town looks out over the plain of the Sele, one of the region's greatest farming assets. In the artificial basin created by the dam on the Sele lies instead the oasis of Persano, one of the most precious natural areas of Campania, managed by the WWF. The town was born around the year one thousand about a castle that no longer exists, and was for centuries a fief of the Sanseverino; in 1532 it passed to the Rossi through the marriage of Giulio Cesare with Maddalena Sanseverino, and in 1626 Giulio de' Rossi became the first duke of Serre.

In 1758 Gherardo de' Rossi sold the fief of Serre and Persano to Charles the Third of Bourbon, but the king had come earlier: between 1752 and 1754 he had already had the royal hunting lodge of Persano built here, on an initial design by the engineer Giovanni Domenico Piana and then by Luigi Vanvitelli. Vanvitelli came back in 1757 to direct the rebuilding of the Verticillo bridge over the Sele, which had been built between 1624 and 1625 and which the bombing of the second world war then destroyed: today only its ruins remain. At Pagliarelle there is still a Roman bridge of the road from Capua to Regium, and at Pagliarone an inscription that Ferdinand the Fourth of Bourbon had cut in 1779 for the making of the road to the Calabrias. In the sanctuary of the Madonna dell'Olivo, finally, the stucco effigy on the high altar goes back to the last decade of the thirteenth century and is the oldest Marian image of its kind in the Alburni and in the whole province of Salerno: its style is close to Byzantine hieratic art.