Torchiara

In 1848 the Bourbon authorities considered Torchiara a den of insurrection, and they meant it seriously: a ship was fitted out to land a battalion of soldiers at Agropoli with the task of putting the district of Torchiara in order, and an official reported that the rebels' chief meeting place was the tavern of Sant'Antuono. The men who had roused the village were Gian Battista Riccio and the brothers Angelo and Carlo Pavone, and their column was to join the others at Vallo della Lucania. It went badly; but a century later there were still people singing at the fairs a rhyme that told the day it had all begun, the seventeenth of January, and gave the names of the officers.

From 1811 Torchiara was the head of its own circondario, and under it stood six comuni — among them Agropoli, which at that time was the smallest of them all. It kept its administrative role until 1927; then the circondari were abolished, and one after another the offices left: the court to Vallo della Lucania, and with it the prison closed; the registry office to Agropoli. The village is divided into two halves, the upper and the lower, and the names of its quarters are the names of the families who owned them — Li Pavoni, Li Gaifieri, Li Ciota, Li Galvani. In 1535 the last prince of Salerno sold the whole fief for five thousand five hundred ducats. The church of the Santissimo Salvatore is of 1100, and outside, among the fields, stands the Torre Mangone, an eighteenth-century little fort whose two corner watchtowers were later used as dovecotes.