Trentinara

The village sits on a rocky spur sheer above the plain of the Sele, and its fortune is a small square. They call it the terrace of the Cilento because from there you can see everything: the plain, the excavations of Paestum, the gulf of Salerno from the bay of Agropoli to the Amalfi coast and, on good days, Capri. It is why people climb up here, and it is also why in September 1943, during the Allied landing at Salerno, Trentinara came close to being razed to the ground: the Germans had placed their military post exactly there, on the panoramic square. A belvedere has always been an observation post as well, and this one was already so in Roman times, when the garrisons here watched over the whole coast of Paestum.

The name too, if the most widely followed hypothesis is right, comes from soldiers: it would be the pay of three denarii given to those on guard at an aqueduct on Monte Vesole. The fief changed hands an impressive number of times — the counts of Capaccio until the middle of the twelfth century, then the Rizzo, the Brancaccio, Bernardino Rota, the Del Giudice, the Sanseverino, and finally the De Angelis, who in 1710 received the title of marquis and held the fief until the abolition of feudalism in 1806. From the main square to the terrace one walks along the via dell'amore, where professor Sergio Vecchio has hand-painted majolica tiles with famous sayings about love, chosen by the journalist Giuseppe Liuccio, who comes from here. At the end of the path is the preta 'ncatenata: two boulders wedged into one another, which the village reads as an embrace. The legend says they are Saul and Isabella — he a brigand chief, she the marquis's daughter — who threw themselves from the cliff because they could not be together. A little further on, the church of San Nicola, of the eleventh century, deconsecrated, is today the museum of craftsmanship.