CASTRUM SALERNI - 200 BC

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 To indicate the city as a fortified place, Latin uses three words with similar meanings: "castrum", "castellum", and "oppidum". The term "castrum", with the addition of the term to the name of the place, indicated the camp fortified by the legionaries: these were mostly built in wood, and it is for this reason that today we do not find any trace of them. The entry "oppidum" instead has its original meaning in every space surrounded by walls, and consequently the meaning of a fortified place but also of a city is taken up.

The original nucleus of the Roman colony of Salernum was a castrum, a military camp. The Roman castrums were not designed to withstand long sieges, as we are used to seeing in films about medieval castles with catapults, towers, fiery arrows, etc., but they had to prevent enemies militarily "primitive" and militarily backward, armed with a sword, shield and ladder, penetrated inside the military camp. A series of ditches of medium depth, a boundary wall, made of wood or stone, was more than enough. But above all the Roman soldiers, once they identified the enemy, went to meet him, pushing him back into the open field.

The decision of Rome to found a new settlement in the northern sector of the Sele plain (Ager Picentinus) formed part of the new structure delineated for the region at the end of the war with Taranto (280-272 BC), which marked the passage of Southern Italy under the Roman control.

The geographer Strabone remembers the settlements present between the Sorrento peninsula and the Sele river, Marcina and Picentia, and explains how the Piceni were forced by the Romans to live in villages scattered throughout the territory because in the second Punic war (218- 202 BC) they had betrayed Rome, passing through the ranks of Hannibal. Finally, he specifies that in order to exercise a form of control over the Piceni the Romans had fortified Salerno, a castrum that he places a short distance from the sea. The restlessness of the Picentini advised the establishment of a castrum, a military camp, in order to prevent raids along the passages between the hills, including that of the Fossa Lupara (today's valley of Canalone) towards the countryside of Nuceria Alfaterna (today Nocera Superiore)

So the Castrum Salerni can be considered born around 200 BC, six years before the Oppidum Salerni foundation. The castrum was probably built on "Plaium Montis" at the top of the escarpment that we currently see looming over the Fornelle and Galesse districts, and which at the time also loomed over the Canali area, straddling the initial stretch, today via Trotula de Ruggiero, of the path to the Fossa Lupara. 

When Scipione l'Africano was a censor, stations for collecting customs duties on goods (portoria venalicium) were established in a place called "Castrum quo in loco nunc oppidum est". The latter could be identified with Salernum as the expression echoes that of Titus Livius for the deduction of the colony "ad castrum Salerni".

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