The name says the same thing twice: «in lamis», in Latin, means in the marshes, and the old centre is called Padula, which is the marsh in dialect. Before the drainage, all this was bog. The centre is medieval, with low terraced houses nearly all white, narrow streets and blind alleys, and Riccardo Bacchelli, who put it in a novella, saw the rows of identical roofs lying like «un ammattonato a spina», a herringbone brick floor. On Good Friday the town does something you do not forget: the fracchie, horizontal torches weighing tons, piled on small wagons, set alight and dragged through the streets. Tradition says they serve to light the road for the mother of Christ, who goes looking for the body of her son.
A couple of kilometres east stands the sanctuary of San Matteo, which at first sight looks like a fortress and is not: it is a place of worship and hospitality of the ninth or tenth century, and the town belonged to it until 1793 — the same year in which Ferdinand IV granted San Marco the title of city. The first certain date in its documents is 1007. It was Benedictine, then Cistercian by a bull of Clement V, then, from 1568, of the Friars Minor Observant; and in those years it received from the cathedral of Salerno a relic attributed to the apostle Matthew, a molar tooth. Ever since, everybody has called it the convent of San Matteo, although its canonical name has stayed the convent of San Giovanni in Lamis. In the middle of the fifteenth century a community of Albanians fleeing the Turks settled here, come from the other shore of the Adriatic. The road that passes through is the Via Sacra Langobardorum, the pilgrims' way to the grotto of saint Michael. And after the unification these mountains were a land of brigandage: more than fifty brigands of San Marco were shot or died in the clashes after 1861.
