Siano

The valley in which this village lies is called Valle dell'Orco, the ogre's valley, and nobody quite knows why. The likeliest explanation is climatic: a strong wind that blew for long stretches of the year. But another, handed down by word of mouth, says that the ogre is Hannibal: coming from the plain of Sarno and taking the track that would later become the road from Capua to Regium, he crossed the pass near what is still called the Campanile dell'Orco and camped in this valley in 216 before Christ, putting it to fire and sword together with all the country around during the siege of Nuceria Alfaterna. The mountains too have names of the same kind: monte Le Porche probably comes from the pig farms that were kept there in numbers, and on the maps it is also given as monte La Foresta, for the oaks and turkey oaks that covered it; monte Iulio, according to tradition, was consecrated by the Romans to Caesar, who granted it to his legionaries so that they could cut their wood there.

The ground, here, is made of other people's eruptions. Under the pastures there is a limestone base, and over it, in the course of the millennia, thick blankets of ash and lapilli were laid down: first by the volcanic systems of Ischia and of the Phlegraean Fields, then by the Somma-Vesuvius complex. The cores show the superimposed layers of the prehistoric eruptions — that of Codola about twenty-five thousand years ago, that of Sarno about seventeen thousand, that of Novelle about fifteen thousand, that of Ottaviano about eight thousand, that of Avellino about three thousand seven hundred. And it is also the reason for the disaster: on 5 May 1998 the landslides that struck this ridge of the Picentini sowed death and destruction in the comune's territory and hit as hard Sarno, Quindici and Bracigliano. On the flank of monte Le Porche the scraped hollows still show the limestone underneath; the mountain, after all, had been losing its cover for years, cleared at the foot from the nineteen eighties on and burned every summer by fires.