Patron saint festival In 300 days
Feast of Saint Lawrence
📅 Every year, on 10 August
On 10 August Torre Orsaia, a municipality of 2,185 inhabitants in the province of Salerno, celebrates its patron Saint Lawrence (san Lorenzo).
In 1301 monsignor Pagano, bishop of Policastro, resolved to assert his feudal rights over the territory of the diocese and had a summer residence built here. Then he issued a proclamation which is a property advertisement in due form: to anyone willing to take up residence near the bishop's palace he promised land enough for a house, a vineyard, a kitchen garden and a hayrick, in exchange for the payment of a tax called pregata. In the same period the Capitula terre turris ursaye were drawn up, a code regulating civil life and the relations between the inhabitants and the bishop-baron. The source, however, is honest on one point: a settlement, however small, was already there, and both the proclamation and the code served only to put into writing situations and customs that had taken hold over the course of two centuries. A founding act that founds something already in existence.
Those two centuries had a precise cause. Towards the middle of the eleventh century pirate raids, malaria and the destruction of Policastro carried out in 1065 by Robert Guiscard pushed the coastal populations to move inland, and from that movement was born the first settlement of the Terra Turris Ursajae. Not far off, a place the Lombards already considered strategic hosted the camp of the troops of Roger II the Norman, and from that comes the name of today's Castel Ruggero, which was an autonomous comune until 1929. The medieval village stands on a hill among centuries-old olive trees of the Pisciotta variety, and just outside the houses there are two stone fountains, dell'Olmo and della Scalitta, which speak of the work of the local stonecutters.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Torre Orsaia 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Torre Orsaia
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Torre Orsaia, but an easy day trip away.
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola 📍 Carpi · 11 km Jesuit church of 1670-1682 in Carpi, on a Greek-cross plan, with scagliola altars and the diocesan museum. Basilica cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 📍 Carpi · 11 km Carpi cathedral begun in 1514 to Peruzzi's design, reopened in 2017 after the 2012 earthquake. Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello 📍 Carpi · 12 km Romanesque pieve of 1184, the oldest church in Carpi, with a Peruzzi façade and twelfth-century frescoes. Chiesa di San Bernardino da Siena 📍 Carpi · 12 km Patron church of Carpi, begun in 1604, with the reliquary bust of Saint Bernardino of Siena.