Sessa Cilento

The summit of monte della Stella, a little over one thousand one hundred metres, falls inside this comune: it is the mountain the whole Cilento looks up at, and on top, beside a radar station, stands the church of the Madonna del Monte della Stella. Below, the comune is made of scattered villages — Sessa, Valle, San Mango, Casigliano, Castagneta, Santa Lucia, Offoli — and each has its own story. At San Mango stand the imposing ruins of the monastery of Santa Maria degli Eremiti, founded in 1093: around it grew a community of ninety-five families, one of the largest in the Cilento of the time, and until the fifteenth century that monastery was the centre of the economy and of the religious life of the whole area. At Valle the water served another trade: from the twelfth century the mills along the Sorrentini stream were so many that the place was called Valle molendinorum, the valley of the mills, and the name has stayed in the hamlet of Valle Cilento; the path among the mills can still be walked.

The village, in Greek, was called Syessa. From 1811 to 1860 it belonged to the district of Pollica, in the Vallo division of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and then to the Pollica mandamento until 1927: around here the administration has always gone through that town. In the old centre stand the palaces of the families — Botti, Coccoli, Giordano at Sessa, Coppola at Valle, Del Giudice at San Mango — and chapels everywhere, along the streets and out in the fields, one for each saint: Santa Lucia, the Immacolata, San Donato, the Holy Trinity, San Rocco, the Madonna del Carmine, Sant'Aniello, Sant'Agnese. And then there is something you do not expect in a village of a thousand souls: a gallery of contemporary art. It gathers about two hundred works by Italian and foreign artists of the second half of the twentieth century, come in with the gift of Rino Volpe and Maria Sofia Boschetti, and it is named after Pietro Volpe, a painter born here.